The Reality Master And The Return Home

THE REALITY MASTER AND THE RETURN HOME A Novel By PM PILLON Copyright 2007 PM Pillon

Volume One: The Reality Master Volume Two: The Reality Master And A Threat To The World Volume Three: The Reality Master And Travel Beyond Volume Four: The Reality Master Mission Through Time The Reality Master And The Return Home the final adventures of joey, kurt & natalie This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Reality Master And The Return Home Copyright Š 2007 by PM Pillon.

Website: pmpillon.com Gmail: pmpillon All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

No parts of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the Copyright holder.

PART I Chapter 1: Lucky Revealed Chapter 2: Showdown In The White House Chapter 3: A Penitent Klaus Radder Chapter 4: An Interdimensional Excursion Chapter 5: Mindpower in Heidelberg Chapter 6: A Scare For Frank Shapiro Chapter 7: Klaus Hears From The President

PART II Chapter 8: Far Away In Time And Space

Chapter 9: A New Lucky Chapter 10: Go South Chapter 11: Knut to America Chapter 12: Sailing Home Chapter 13: Confrontation

Chapter 1: Lucky Revealed Middle school student Joey Blake was in his current present that his miraculous companion Lucky who was a device shaped like a stop watch shattered into three nows at the moment that Lucky reversed the finish of a San Francisco Bay To Breakers foot race and changed it to one more to Joey’s liking. Joey returned to 2014 from 2091 with a recollection of most of his 2089 experiences, but not all of them; for instance, he didn’t remember Kurt being kidnapped or his later reunion with him that was going to happen in the three futures still ahead of him, nor his trip to South America that was going to occur only in his current future. However, he did remember that the evil scientist was going to commit cataclysmic crimes and later – though paradoxically in an earlier time – rescue Chris and Jorge in a distant solar system in the three futures. One of Joey’s three nows featured a future that included a massive earthquake in a baseball park the same afternoon of the morning Bay To Breakers race, another only a tremor, and Joey’s current one, no earthquake at all and therefore no local reaction to it that in other presents resulted in a home invasion of Kurt’s house by a crazed biker. News video in the three presents at the Bay To Breakers showed different finishes, and in all of them there was a comingling of conflicting winners –two different Kenyan runners bizarrely co-winning with a Moroccan; and additionally in Joey’s current present, all three tying as they broke the tape, resulting in subsequent confusion as to who really won as Lucky experimented with Joey’s desire that another Kenyan not be the sole winner.

The National Security Agency sent Jorge to San Francisco to investigate the videos of the race finish that immediately created a national stir when they were broadcast on tv news programs and web sites; after he examined hours of footage at a local tv station he identified Joey and learned his father Mark Blake’s contact information. Because no earthquake occurred after this event and therefore no accompanying Stadium Miracle, no immediate crisis developed and therefore no urgency to find the explanation of the phenomenon arose later the same day when Joey attended a Giants game. In this particular present Jorge more strongly doubted Joey’s involvement, so for the next several days he continued to look for other explanations of the double-winner-plus-tie without success. Finally, after finding no other candidate as having caused the strange event, Jorge and his NSA partner Chris Dorman who was sent from D.C. to supervise him the day after the foot race decided it was time to drive fifty miles south to Palo Alto to try to find out if Joey might have about a miraculous power. Eventually, Chris and Jorge were going to fall into disfavor with their bosses at the NSA where they were disparagingly and resentfully referred to as D&D based on their last names combined with mocking them with a notion of a dynamic duo. Their boss in D.C. Vernon Preston gave them a Direct Order to refrain from confirming to Joey’s father that anything extraordinary may be attributed to him, so Jorge

and Chris had to keep Mark in the dark about what Joey may have done. Vernon was unable to explain this order to Jorge because he didn’t understand it himself, but he had no choice other than to proffer it because those were the instructions that had come to him down the pipeline directly from the head of Homeland Security.

“Beats me how they come up with weird stuff like this, Jorge. Maybe as a psychologist you could shrink some heads and get an idea about it.”

“Not really. It seems obvious that a person of high caliber like Mark Blake and his equally prestigious mother Mary should be fully informed about their own son, but maybe it has to do with receiving some funding or something like that. You know that the upper echelon of intelligence agencies are only interested in covering their behinds and lining up procurement resources, and the actual security of the country is oftentimes an incidental factor in their decision-making.”

“I wish I could disagree with you, but I fear you’re right. Then again, maybe they just decided to exercise their control-freak mania because they don’t want to admit that they can’t get their inept heads around this foot race miracle. And to hell with them if they’re tapping this phone and heard us say all this. Good luck and God speed.”

“Thanks Vernon, I’ll need it.”

Due to Vernon’s order, Chris and Jorge had to employ a cover story when they contacted Mark, so when Jorge called him he did so ostensibly to consult him about his expertise as a Stanford University social history professor with regard to when and why people had begun to report UFOs, abductions by aliens, etc. in the 1940’s but seldom previously. Jorge was primarily a psychology researcher for the NSA, so he was far less comfortable than she was with the cloak and dagger subterfuge that required agents to lie to good people that he fully respected and even admired. Although Chris as a full time agent was far more experienced at practicing duplicity when dealing with the public, Jorge was more accustomed with Mark’s academic environment, so she authorized Jorge to rely on his own judgment about whether he should contact and interview Mark in her presence. Events appeared to be moving too fast for Jorge’s liking, and it seemed like just yesterday he was comfortably settled into a job as a psychologist in an Arizona hospitals; causing him to wonder if he was aging prematurely in only his mid-30s. Jorge had contemplated and discussed the bizarre chain of events that brought him to this day a few times, and did so again as he dialed Mark’s work phone number. Mark personally answered his phone and told Jorge he would call him back the next day, and then after researching his credentials and becoming more than satisfied with them, he returned Jorge’s call and gave him an appointment to visit him at his faculty office. Jorge was considerably relieved when it appeared that he had managed his cover story effectively and Mark didn’t seem suspicious because he had no clue about a Plan B if this one failed.

Jorge read up on the subject of UFOs in order to construct a plausible train of conversation with Mark about it. After a somewhat clumsy attempt to interview Mark about UFO psychology, about which Jorge actually knew precious little even after preparing himself for the topic; this was the only paranormal topic in which he was weak and he was in fact considered an expert in all others, such as voodoo, ghosts, miracle healings, etc. He was out of town and learned from his wife by phone that the famous UFO lights had appeared one night over Phoenix passed directly over their home, and even though he read reports by what seemed like totally normal middle

class people of having seen a huge triangular ship pass over the city, Jorge’s interest in Ufology wasn’t piqued by this peculiar even beyond watching what he considered to be a very impressive video of engineers and other reliable witnesses at the National Press Club. Eventually, he concluded that unless he learned otherwise the U.S. government probably had the dead bodies of some kind of aliens on ice, possibly at multiple locations and retrieved from multiple locales including Area 51 in New Mexico, but he didn’t expect this to be revealed during his lifetime – if ever, so he didn’t consider it to be relevant to his life or career.

In spite of the clumsy pretext for Jorge and Mark’s three meetings to discuss UFOs that actually neither of them were particularly interested in, their acquaintanceship nevertheless quickly flowered into an incipient friendship that went beyond a standard collegiality based on both of them having been educated at Princeton. At their initial interview, Jorge felt like he was meeting Mark for the first time, unlike the mutual recognition that he and Chris were going to experience with Joey and Kurt when Mark introduced them. Jorge came back to San Francisco after his first meeting with Mark with a tentative conclusion that he seemed unaware of anything unusual about his son, which Chris and Jorge then reported to their boss Vernon who in turn reported this to his higher-ups. Several days went by without any reaction from D.C. to their report until one day the NSA decided it was time for D&D to bring up the matter of Joey and the foot race to his father because of a report of a miraculous object in South America that they speculated may be related to the foot race phenomenon; essentially rendering, from D&D’s point of view, all their work on a cover null and void and an aggravating waste of time and effort that they never believed was necessary in the first place. Chris had to go to Los Angeles for a day and was still there when the new order came down; and wouldn’t get back until the next day, so Jorge headed south to Palo Alto by himself again. He was far away from his own car that was in his Phoenix garage, so he hopped into the government-issue gray sedan that he picked up at the San Francisco Federal Building an hour after he landed at SFO to begin the investigation a few days earlier and drove to Palo Alto.

After parking at Stanford he called Joey’s father and told him, “Mark, I have something going on that may be of considerable import and may require the participation of your son Joseph.”

“Can I meet you in person to discuss this? It’s a rather long story and it’s also confidential and classified. I’m here on campus and can be at your office in a few minutes if that’s where you are.”

“Classified? Sure, I’ll be in my office in the Neukom building for the next two hours. Come on over.”

“See you in a flash.”

Within minutes, they were together in Mark’s faculty office, and Jorge spoke frankly to him starting out with, “Mark, the now-famous video foot race discrepancy may have been caused by a device that your son Joey has.”

“Get real Jorge, no such device exists, and if it did it sure wouldn’t be in the possession of a ten-year old boy. Are you serious? This has to be some kind of prank. I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a professional with your pedigree and reputation.”

“I wish it was just a prank Mark, but it’s not, I’m deadly serious. When I first approached you about interviewing Joey it was because I saw him on a video looking at something in his

hand when he was with you at this year’s Bay To Breakers. I believe he was looking at a device that he used to change the outcome of the race. If you want to, you can call the phone number of my boss Mr. Vernon Preston at the National Security Agency. Don’t take my word for it, look up the NSA number and ask for Vernon Preston and you’ll get through to him immediately. He’s number four in the agency and I have his full authorization for approaching you about this.”

“The National Security Agency? What do you have to do with them?”

“I’m a researcher for the NSA, and I’m under cover.”

“Under cover for the NSA? I can’t believe that, this is completely out of the blue for you to show up with this kind of story, so pardon my incredulity about all of it, and it it’s true I feel deceived and betrayed … Well, okay Jorge, you don’t have to leave my office, just sit tight there if you want and I’ll look up and call the phone number of this number four in the NSA, Vernon Preston. I distrust you because you lied to me about who you really are, and something as ridiculous as this obliges me to follow up on your suggestion to verify the NSA aspect. I can’t just confront Joey about something he obviously knows nothing about because it’s impossible.

You haven’t said one thing during this conversation so far that is even remotely possible other than calling this NSA official, which I’ll do right now.”

Jorge remained seated in the chair in front of Mark’s desk and texted Chris while Mark Googled the D.C. phone number of the NSA, called it and was expeditiously routed to Vernon Preston, who confirmed for him everything he had just heard from Jorge. Mark considered the flimsiness of Jorge basing his conclusion on conjecture about Joey looking at his hand, but then noticed for the first time some odd behavior by Joey, such as his mysterious conversation with Kurt on the way back from the Giants baseball game that they attended after they watched the foot race. In addiction, because the NSA was involved in the matter, he decided to take the rest of the afternoon off from his campus duties and visit the principal at Joey’s school with Jorge to have him call Joey out of his class for a conversation. The principal by that time had heard form Chris, who identified herself as NSA, and after he confimed it he assigned Mark an empty office at the school to speak to Joey alone while Jorge sat in his car in the parking lot and waited to be called in at the appropriate moment, assuming such a moment transpired; again he fretted had no clue about Plan B if Mark found out nothing from Joey about a device, nor did Chris come up with one over the phone. Jorge felt like he was a fish out of water at this kind of work and wished he could just go home and leave it all to Chris.

Joey was going to instantly recognize Jorge and Chris as his close friends when he met them because he had future memories about them, including knowing that they were later going to become his partisan supporters, and also remembered that they were going to dissemble to their superiors after meeting him, his sister and his best friend Kurt, falsely claiming that Joey had no miracle device as part of their full commitment to try to shield them from malfeasance by the feds if they possibly could, along with an implacable determination to allow no threats – even of imprisonment or death – to unlock their lips about Joey’s miracle-making sidekick. Shortly after learning about Lucky, Chris and Jorge mutually and emphatically agreed early on that they would, like the two boys who they considered to be under their care, trust in Lucky to see them through whatever tribulations may lie ahead for the boys, for them, for their country and even for all living entities. Jorge bluntly warned Mark that if higher echelon bosses were to confirm Joey’s power they probably would kidnap and sequester him and maybe torture him, applying

some boneheaded axiom they stubbornly applied from their previous fiascos such as the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and Iraq that not only failed but actually backfired against U.S. interests. After some discussion of the conundrum with Jorge, Mark saw the writing on the wall and invited Jorge to visit his home because Joey was due home after school in an hour. They did this and were drinking coffee in the kitchen when Joey arrived.

Mark said, “Joey, this is my friend, Dr. Jorge Donovan, he’s visiting from Arizona.”

Joey smiled and said, “Pleased to meet you, Uncle Jorge.”

“Dr. Uncle Jorge? Why do you call him that?”

Joey continued to smile and looking at Jorge said, “I dunno, I just felt like calling him that.”

Jorge stroked his chin because this rang some kind of bell in his mind that he couldn’t precisely identify, while Mark furrowed his brown and asked, “I guess it’s no harm in it, but just in case, here’s a point of fact: he’s not your uncle. Anyway, you may or may not know what I’m talking about and I know this is going to sound ridiculous to you, but do you have a device that has some sort of phenomenal power?”

Joey changed his visage to a vague frown that to his father seemed to express reluctance rather than surprise and replied, “Uhhh … no, not really.”

“Joey, you’re obviously hedging. Are you saying it’s not a device or that it’s not really power, or what? Do you have something, anything, like what I just described to you? Please come straight with me – I have the federal government breathing down my neck about this.”

“The federal government? How did they find o… I mean, why do they think something weird like that?”

“Joey, just show it to me if you have it with you. I’ve been told it fits in your hand. Stop beating around the bush, you’re not good at dissembling.”

“Okay dad, you’re right, I do have something, but I don’t want the government to even know about him.”

“I’ll do anything I can to prevent that if that’s what you want, but I have to know who him is if I’m going to help you do that. They know about him anyway, so you need to turn to me to help you or you’ll have no one to turn to at all.”

Joey took out the stone he called Lucky and showed it to him, but Lucky was blank and therefore didn’t look like anything extraordinary; whereupon Jorge smiled and said, “Do you mind, Joey? I can leave if you want me to and you can just explain everything to your dad without me being here.”

“Uncle Jorge, don’t leave and promise me that you won’t let the government take Lucky away from me. You’re my friend, you gotta help me.”

“Joey, you should address him as Dr. Donovan, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to call him as Uncle Jorge. This whole kettle of stew is getting curiouser and curiouser – I think it’s starting to give me a headache. I’ve never seen you like this, Joey.”

“Dad, please don’t force me to explain to you how Jorge and I have been good friends since at least the year twenty eight-nine. If I do that you’ll really get a headache, and maybe a toothache and a stomach ache and even an entire body and mind ache. He’s an NSA agent and his partner is my equally good friend Christine Dorman and she will still be my friend in twenty eight-nine.”

“Why do you say twenty eight-nine. Do you mean 2009?”

Jorge said, “No, you heard right, Joey does mean 2089, a few decades into the future. I just now realized I have a memory of the future in 2089, just like Joey is saying he remembers 2089.

Joey and I and Chris have been through hell and high water together in the future in and we’re the best of friends. That’s also true of my unbreakable friendship with Natalie and Paul and Joey’s best friend Kurt.”

Mark asked, “You’ve both been in the future – like Michael J. Fox? How did you do that – never mind, don’t tell me, the more I hear the confuser I get. Oh … my … God, everybody in this room has gone crackers.” Mark said as he collapsed into a chair that was just behind him.

Jorge disregarded Mark’s collapse and continued, “That’s not what this is about Joey, taking Lucky away from you. I haven’t told them about Lucky and we just want to ask you to help us because we may be facing a dire threat very soon.”

“What kind of threat?”

“I don’t know. Vernon didn’t tell me and I don’t think his bosses want him or me or Chris or you to know what it is.”

“You know you can count on me and you also know that Lucky will fix it no matter what it is.”

“Yes, I do. I know all of that.”

Jorge hugged Joey, thanked him and Mark and told them he would return soon to give them more of the crucial information about the threat; he headed back to San Francisco where he filed another of his typically obfuscatory reports to his bosses in which he claimed that it was unclear whether Joey had any special power, but a few days later the NSA – as always, doubting Jorge’s veracity – kidnapped Kurt without informing Jorge or Chris that they would do so.

Chapter 2: Showdown In The White House During the next year, the protective efforts of Jorge and Chris in behalf of Joey and his loved ones failed in Kurt’s case because notwithstanding their desire to shield the children, he was misidentified by the NSA as the foot race miracle maker and snatched by their operatives who whisked him out of the country and held him captive on a remote island until he was eventually reunited with Joey and Lucky in Senegal; whereupon Lucky undid a host of apocalyptic crimes perpetrated by the German-born American physicist Klaus Radder; who himself later did a complete about-face and became an exceedingly unlikely hero – considering his past nefariousness – by rescuing Chris and Jorge and their dozens of fellow astronauts who were in dire straits in a distant time and solar system while their predicament was occurring … a hundred years in the future. Chris and Jorge were present when Klaus performed the rescue and even spoke to themselves in the future via Lucky’s display screen, but the event had already vanished from their memories by the very next morning. Chris and Jorge wanted to stay close to each other and to the Blake and McCarthy families, so they both sought and tentatively received reassignments from the NSA to San Francisco, he from Phoenix and she from D.C. so they could live together and devote themselves to the case; and if he felt bold enough to do it Jorge planned to ask the President to expedite their permanent transfer when they met this afternoon. Chris and Jorge had repeatedly dreamed while sleeping in their San Francisco apartment about Joey’s device with which – or with whom? – he had partnered, and with whom he was going to alter

multiple catastrophes in their presence, but neither of them had a recollection of these as actual events.

They had dreams about Kurt being kidnapped and his later reunion with Joey that was among their lost memories but was confirmed in reports that they themselves had written; and about planets including the one that was their home being utterly obliterated which occurred in the future and therefore wasn’t realistically confirmable, as well as other incidents that eventually came to pass and therefore weren’t just dreams. On the morning after Chris and Jorge’s rescue by Klaus while they were far the future and far from their home star known as the Sun, Chris woke up just after day break and saw that Jorge was sound asleep, so she quietly slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the living room where she activated her laptop and was surprised to find on it multiple messages that congratulated her about the previous day; but strangely, she couldn’t remember anything at all about yesterday, and reading them repeatedly and thoroughly did nothing but compound her perplexity. The rescue originally occurred soon after the Bay To Breakers foot race, but Lucky’s disruption of time continuum shoved it into the future to a few days after the evil scientist Klaus Radder’s Vanishing in Senegal that wiped out several American cities.

Oh no! she thought, another blackout like Senegal! She checked Facebook and Twitter as well as emails and quickly focused on the ones from her boss in D.C., Vernon Preston, which were the only ones that were atypical of the ones from U.S. Marshals and her other associates because he described a gap in his memories from the entire previous day like the one she had; whereas others who were present appeared to have total recall about the beneficiaries of Klaus Radder’s rescue that included – or more accurately, was going to include Chris and Jorge themselves, many light years and a century from here and now. She immediately called Vernon, who told her he had tried to call her during the night; he had failed to reach her because she and Jorge, a covert agent who doubled as a psychologist with a private practice, always turned off all communications equipment barring an expectation of urgent news that were supposed to wake up their devices but malfunctioned and failed to do so. Chris was astounded to learn from Vernon that he had found both digital and printed records of the incredible rescue the previous day of which he had no personal recollection, and that his consultations with others who were present during the event and were able to describe them to him vividly and in detail had failed to clarify his memory. Chris had other significant memory gaps, but this was far stranger than the others, from her point of view. After speaking to Vernon she woke Jorge up only to find that he likewise had no recollection of the various events Vernon had just discussed with her, as with the Africa trip in which all extant accounts that he was aware of thus far reported that he had participated.

“This is weird Jorge, it’s a dejá vu all over again like our blackouts about Kurt’s kidnapping and trip to Africa that we only remember now as dreams. I remember meeting with the kids and their parents and promising to protect them, but everything after that is still lost to me. What about you?”

“Same here, still no recollection of any of it.”

“Check your email accounts and see if you previously talked about a bizarre rescue of us while we are a hundred years in the future.”

Jorge looked at his previous emails and confirmed to Chris that he also had discussed the previous day’s events, and while he did this she found long reports that they had written together

about it; and then he found his own individual versions of reports on his laptop with her comments annotated on them. A few minutes later, they were called by Vernon and ordered to board a flight ASAP to D.C. for a personal meeting both of them would have with the President of the United States. On the plane on the way to the East Coast the next morning, they reiterated to each other that in spite of all their confusion about what did or didn’t happen any time in the past, they would attempt to hold the line and not reveal their knowledge that Joey had the device with which they believed he had changed events; as shown in videos they not only had seen many times in the past but also thankfully still remembered seeing; and which also thankfully still showed the changed result when they reviewed them soon after their perplexing phone call from Vernon. They falsely reported to their superiors that they had encountered no evidence as to the provenance of whatever power Joey had that reversed events appeared to have left him.

Although Joey lived only fifty miles south of them in Palo Alto, they had no opportunity to clandestinely reconnoiter with him to find out what he did or didn’t remember about the previous day’s incredible rescue because he and his father at the moment were roughing it in the woods of Big Sur another two hours further south; and they couldn’t risk calling him even if he was within range of a cell phone tower because they knew their own federal government was certainly intercepting and recording all calls to Joey’s phones. They went across town to a café they had never previously visited to discuss their ongoing prevarication predicament.

Jorge started out with, “Chris, I hate to bring this up yet again, but we’re on thin ice trying to withhold information while at the same time inexplicably missing so much of it from our memories.”

“Our memory blanks are irrelevant Jorge, Joey and Kurt are innocent children and our bests friends, and we faithfully pledged to them that we will protect their secret. It would be betrayal if we didn’t do that and having forgotten past events doesn’t change that one whit. We have an absolute moral imperative and duty to stand by them and protect them from our government, which nobody knows as well as we do how Machiavellian it is.”

“I like that about you, the fact that you were originally a by-the-book agent and I was the schmaltzy one who sympathized with the kids, but then you did a 180 and now you’re pushing for their welfare even more than I was and I’m the one who is weak-kneed about it. Anyway, you’re right, I wasn’t suggesting revealing their secret, though of course some hidden mike in our clothes might already have transmitted it to the NSA.” “Except you’re forgetting that I’m an expert on eavesdropping technology and there are no hidden mikes anywhere around us or in our home.”

“Okay, I’ll have to rely on your confidence in that. Sorry to be so nervous about it, but our lives may literally be on the line if the consarned gubmint is onto to us.”

“I’m not saying I can beat the consarned gubmint on everything, but on this I am indeed quite confident. Eavesdropping is my specialty, and if they come up with something new that they can keep me from finding out about I’m hoping by then it’ll be too late for them to harm the boys in any way.”

“That’s a very iffy proposition because the gubmint will still be around and still cynical long after we’re not.”

“So, enough blabber Jorge, do we hold fast on the secret or not?”

“Of course we hold fast, but God help our souls if it doesn’t work out for us. You know the

feds don’t care about truth, beauty or justice and won’t hesitate to take us out with extreme prejudice if they conclude that we’re an obstacle or impingement in any way.”

“We’ve been over this many times already Jorge, just gird your loins because if there isn’t justice, there isn’t a reason for living.”

When they arrived in D.C. they were put through a battery of measures including hypnosis to try to help them retrieve their lost memories, but all to no avail; after all of it they still remembered nothing except the bare bones of their relationship with Joey after investigating the foot race videos. When they were asked about Joey losing his miraculous power they lied and passed the polygraph with flying colors because they had the expertise to fool it, both of them being covert agents accustomed to lying; and one of them being a psychologist who had previously administered and studied reactions to polygraph and pentathol compound testing. On an appointed morning three days after waking up to the startling revelations about their rescue by Klaus Radder, Chris strode into the White House in a preemptive mood of defiance to meet with President Robert Thurmond. She expected to be stridently confronted and intended to hold her own, just as her boss Vernon Preston had done for her and Jorge on the Bay To Breakers case when they were justifiably accused of dissembling in their reports on Joey’s miracles. Christine’s boss warned her that she should expect to be fiercely assailed and challenged by All The President’s Men when she arrived to report on Senegal and previous miraculous events in the Oval Office. Like Chris and Jorge, Vernon had vehemently persisted in his reports to his bosses that she and Jorge had been forthright and that the events in Senegal that were in effect a reset and reboot of reality were an unexplained mystery possibly attributable to temporary psychic powers Joey had that had since disappeared, but he knew that none of this was really believed upstairs of his D.C. office.

Because all of the events were unprecedented in U.S. or even world history, the upstairs officials didn’t know how to deal with them, but Vernon knew they might at any time decide to crack down and try to force whatever the truth was, out of the two agents, so he was on pins and needles about what was going to happen to his two favorite agents, one of whom had been a personal friend of his over many years. D&D were very anxious as they awaited their coming meetings with the President, who had a reputation for being hard line against any of his wayward officials. However, when Chris arrived at the Oval Office she was in for a surprise because the President greeted her with a very friendly manner; as soon as she was ushered in he stood up, walked around his desk and approached her smiling with his right hand extended to shake hers, doing it so quickly he met her after she took just two steps inside the office. He didn’t introduce her to CIA Director Arnold Mitchell, who discretely trailed behind him and was the only other person present in the office – presumably as an NSA field official she would already know who he is, and at any rate he had been sternly admonished by the President to maintain silence during the initial greeting because he suspected Mitchell of being hostile towards her and her NSA partner; the President had unequivocally informed his long-time friend Mitchell that if he was the least bit abrasive towards her he would be looking for a new job the next day. Thus, Mitchell likewise greeted her in a friendly way with a handshake and a guarded smile but uttered not a word as he followed the two of them to the President’s desk, sitting down next to Chris in the second arm chair in front of it as the President sat down behind it. Chris thought, so far so good, but be ready for the hammer to come down, as the President initiated their conversation,

continuing his friendly tone and manner.

“Agent Dorman, I’m very pleased to meet you after hearing so much about your excellent work. But that’s no surprise, considering your many years of service at the highest levels of competence and training. I hope you’ll excuse me if I have to answer the phone a couple of times while we’re talking. I’d love to just turn it off in your estimable presence, but a matter could arise that might require my urgent attention. Please enlighten me if you can about what you discovered concerning the San Francisco Bay To Breakers video peculiarity and then go on from there. I’ve watched it and the disappearing cities videos and found them to be quite extraordinary. And then explain what really happened with Kurt McCarthy’s resuscitation in a hospital after he was injured by an explosion at his home, and then what occurred in Senegal and then your future rescue by Dr. Radder, as succinctly as possible please, as I am pressed for time today so maybe we’ll have to discuss this again later this week. We have various video angles of a cliff collapsing onto a Senegal beach and conflicting witness accounts about it, including the ones in your reports.”

“Events vis-à-vis the Bay To Breakers foot race video phenomenon unfolded quickly, Mr. President, but it’s nevertheless a long story that is in my report on your desk titled NSA Dorman BTB Video Summary. If you’ve read it you already know most of what I will now relate to you, but I have to work my way through all of it, otherwise I’m at risk of melting into a puddle of incoherence. I was sent from my home office here in D.C. to San Francisco to supervise Dr. Jorge Donovan to investigate the foot race video discrepancy, and together we fortunately managed to quickly locate two ten-year-old boys who were present at the race and had struck Jorge – I mean Dr. Donovan –as the only persons of interest from his examination of videos of finish line spectators because he observed that one of them, Joey Blake, was looking at the palm of his hand just as the race ended rather than watching the runners, which presumably was the entire purpose of braving the long early-morning drive there from their homes in Palo Alto; the cold early morning weather, the huge crowds in order to approach the finish line, etc.

“I noticed you called Dr. Donovan Jorge. Is there some significance that I could infer from that? Are you personally close to each other now?”

“Mr. President, he and I have been working non-stop together on this case, so we took to calling each other by our first names and are now living together as a couple and engaged to be married.”

“Okay, anyway go on.”

“We eventually learned that the boys thought they were able to reverse occurrences, and when one of the runners was intentionally or inadvertently bumped into just before crossing the finish line and lost the race, they reoccured the event with a different result, which was captured in various news and personal cell phone footage. They said that they had found a device inserted in brush on the face of a cliff in Big Sur and a few months later Joey was seen and video’d plucking something from the Senegal village cliff, but Joey says he never learned who put it there and that he has since lost track of it. If it is real and able to perform the miracles attributed to it, we have to assume it may have directed itself via its own propulsion to both cliffs, as it was seen floating in the air on more than one occasion. Dr. Donovan believes Joey’s power was actually some kind of kinetic transubstantiation and the object was purely symbolic with no ability to exercise or confer extraordinary powers, I only mention this in my report tangentially

because I have no expertise in the field of mental forensics, so you’ll find the vanishing cities phenomenon elucidated only in Dr. Donovan’s report, not in mine. I can’t begin to explain what happened there. I’m sure you are aware that neither of us has any recollection of ever having been in any part of Africa, so anything I tell you about Senegal is from accounts that I and others wrote, not from my personal recollection because I have none, it’s completely blacked out of my memory. And the only theory about vanishing cities causation that I know of is also from Dr. Donovan and also far beyond my pay grade. Anyway, Joey says he woke up one morning and found that the object was gone, and that he believes it is a living entity that returned to its home, though he says he has no idea where that home might be.”

“I get confused about what you remember and what you forgot. Anyway, I know this is in your report, but forgive me for going over it again in person. When you met the boys did you personally see the miracle-producing object?”

“The boys didn’t show the object to us, nor did they provide us with a photograph or other proof of its existence. The Bay To Breakers video that pointed us to them doesn’t show it, only his hand, so in short, there’s no objective evidence of its existence. My NSA partner Dr. Jorge Donovan and I have concluded that there probably was no such device and that Joey had temporary kinetic powers that he hasn’t recently demonstrated and presumably no longer retains, and that they had some kind of solid object to which they mistakenly ascribed shamanistic powers. As you and the entire American public know, we have the indisputable evidence that the foot race was in fact recurred differently because the reversal left a residual specter of the finish that was changed, but not of Joey’s claim that a few months later his device canceled the destruction of cities which I evidently witnessed but am unaccountably unable to in the slightest recall seeing. Only the American John Dayton who was standing next to Joey said he saw the device and the famous floating screen, but Dr. Donovan believes Mr. Dayton’s experience was phantasmagoria caused by hysterical contagion. He likewise attributes the subsequent accounts and videos of disappearing cities from Americans who were near them to psychogenic synesthesia. Again, my conclusion with which Dr. Donovan fully concurred, is in that report on your desk, that the entire matter is unexplained and perhaps – pending future developments – inexplicable. In case you haven’t had time to carefully study the report due to your myriad other responsibilities, Dr. Donovan’s statement confirming my objective chronology is appended to the report.”

“Yes, it is a very interesting account, I must say, and very concisely written and gripping, if you’ll pardon some faint praise of your literary skills on my part. I think there is mention in it of a covert search of the boys’ homes to see if the object could be found. The trip to Senegal cost our government a fistful of dollars during these penurious times, so it’s unfortunate that we didn’t get anything concrete or definitive out of it. I don’t have to tell you that such a device could be a boon to our national security and a bane to our adversaries, and if they locate it before we do the reverse would be the case and potentially disastrous for our nation, which is why I asked you to come in personally to tell me about this … Lucky-slash-device-slash-entity – or maybe it’s an Invisible Rabbit or a Hobbit? Are you sure the boys don’t still have it? We have only their word that they don’t.”

“I was worried that a covert search would alienate the boys and perhaps otherwise backfire in some way that I might fail to anticipate. So we did no covert search, but as the report states,

the boys allowed us along with several dozen marshals to virtually turn their homes upside down hunting for the object, without success. I have full confidence in the veracity of all assertions by Joey and Kurt, but we don’t know if what they believe is accurate.”

Director Mitchell interjected, “So maybe the device is on their school’s grounds or a local park or some other location that they frequent? Or maybe back in Big Sur where they say they found it?”

“Again, the report explains that we sealed off the school one afternoon after classes were concluded and searched it thoroughly, also without results.”

Mitchell apologized, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have popped off without having read your entire report.

“No, that’s okay, it’s an important matter to discuss. We met no objections from the two boys about doing this search and performed it openly with the full cooperation of the principal. But I’m sure there are places even our forty-eight NSA agents missed – we kept all state and local officials out of the loop for reasons I can explain but which you have probably already deduced, given the high-security nature of the task.”

“Did you ever search the boys themselves, since the object was small enough to fit in their pockets?”

“We came close to doing that, but ultimately decided against it because we feared the effect on their trust for us if we searched their persons. Most likely if they had it they would stash it somewhere before meeting us, and a sudden raid on them would risk the comity that we value with them and perhaps cause them to regard us as their adversaries. We searched virtually every major location they said they visited while they had the object, including a local mall and a skateboard park, but again we came up empty. Problematically, during the weeks that they had it they visited hundreds of locales including probably some they afterwards forgot about, so we couldn’t search all of them.”

“Now let’s move on to a somewhat more touchy subject. Please explain the allegation that you and Dr. Donovan were less than forthcoming in your report and to what if anything you attribute your memory loss. Evidently our memory experts were unable to coax a remembrance of crucial events out of you.”

“Mr. President, we are understandably concerned about the welfare of Joey and Kurt. They are vulnerable children and American citizens, so we are duty-bound to protect them.”

“Well, I’m not going to lean on you, Agent Dorman, but you must understand that I have a larger duty to the entire nation, not just to two boys, so I have to ask you to tell me now whatever it is you held back in your reports. And by the way, Kurt McCarty’s kidnapping and sequestration was done without my authorization or knowledge.”

As he said this he gave a hard glance at Mitchell, and after a pregnant pause, Chris also gazed at Mitchell intently and then asserted, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but there’s nothing for me to tell, and I’m sure you’ll hear the same from Dr. Donovan.”

The President looked at a computer tablet on his desk, smiled and said, “Yes, I don’t doubt that. I have a meeting scheduled with him two hours from now. He’s an expert on paranormal phenomena?”

“He has the reputation of being the foremost paranormal expert in the U.S. – however, I don’t know about European or other foreign experts.”

“Okay, what about Senegal? There was a prophecy that the two boys were going to reunite there with the stone entity they called Lucky in the exact way that it later occurred?”

“Yes, and the two boys say that massive conflagrations were undone by Lucky while we were at the collapsing Senegal cliff, which John Dayton says he witnessed on some kind of floating screen. However, my partner Dr. Donovan is skeptical and believes it was a product of hysteria.”

“Is Dayton a reliable person?”

Mitchell interjected, “Yes, he checked out in every way. He’s a journalist and photographer for National Geographic and other mainstream publications.”

“Isn’t that owned by Rupert Murdoch?”

“Yes, but we found no political implications.”

“But … they say they changed the foot race and it was indisputably changed … they found something in a nearby cliff as was prophesied, they say this Lucky destroyed that cliff with at least one man in it, and there was no earthquake or other possible cause for the cliff’s collapse … and videos show and innumerable witnesses saw American cities disappearing. Methinks too much that they claimed appears to be confirmed by tangible evidence, don’t you agree?”

Chris explained, “Dr. Donovan has a compelling theory about psychogenic basis that he can explain to you. I don’t really understand it but it seems to me to be the most likely explanation because it’s based on the power of psychology, which is a science, not some flying-entity hocus pocus, and he thinks it may also explain our memory loss. He says this may be an impressive level of what he calls projected synesthesia, which he believes can reach such an intense level as to actually affect the recording of a video camera.”

“I guess he can tell me about that when I meet him, but I’m not optimistic that I will have any idea what it’s about no matter how arduously he explains it. Anyway, we also have this report from our officials who purport to have been present during some kind of rescue by a scientist of you – of all people – while visiting a planet on some other solar system?”

“Yes, it’s the same – synesthesia on what he calls a temporally and extrasolastically distant amplitude, if Dr. Donovan is correct. Although neither he nor I remember the rescue, he applies the same theory to it.”

“I’m not familiar with those terms and I hope he’s not just snowing us with mumbo jumbo.

Other psychologists who read his reports for us doubt but don’t outright dispute his theories or conclusions. I forget, is he a real doctor, or a Ph. d or what?”

“He’s a Doctor of Psychology with a tremendous résumé – Princeton and London education, the whole nine yards.”

“And this is also his theory about why neither of you nor your boss Vernon Preston can remember any of these recent events?”

“This is a recent development Mr. President, and Dr. Donovan says he’s unsure about what caused the erasure of many of our memories as if they were computer hard drives. The two boys recounted odd effects from the so-called device that they noticed in other children who came in contact with it, but that’s not much to go on and it didn’t involve memory erasures as far as I know, or at least the boys didn’t tell us about any. We haven’t been in touch with the boys since Mr. Preston told us to come here because we feel it’s dubious to call them repeatedly and appear to badger them unnecessarily, thereby perhaps obviating cooperation we might get from them

otherwise.”

“Well, thank you Ms. Dorman for your attempt to enlighten me, though I have to admit I wish I could say you succeeded in doing it, as I’m unfamiliar with the terminology you are using – something about synthetics or anesthesia or something which I assume is elucidated in Dr. Donovan’s report that I have only had time to skim through. I have to speak frankly. Ms. Dorman. You’re very articulate and causing me to waver from my opinion prior to speaking to you that some of the events actually were reversed rather than being psychological phenomena as you are implying. But I also know you’re very intelligent and may have an agenda. At any rate, my secretary will give you my personal phone number, and I hope you won’t hesitate to call me if you learn anything significant about this device, and I’ll ask you for another meeting soon if you don’t mind. I won’t annoy you with skeptical questions about the truthfulness of the two boys or whether they’re fantasizing because their most essential claims appear to be confirmed by video tapes. I need you to continue to protect the boys.”

“I already have a phalanx of federal marshals shadowing Joey’s home 24/7, Mr. President.

I’m confident that he’s well protected.”

“I’ll provide you with whatever resources you request for that assignment. Please personally bring or send me a weekly report directly to my phone number you found on your phone when I called you or that my secretary will give you, bypassing all of your superiors, and don’t worry about them finding out you’re telling me something you’re not telling them. Thank you for coming to see me and I hope we can chat again so you can explain again in more detail.

Unfortunately, I have to deal with the European economic crisis in fifteen minutes, so your detailed version will have to occur another time. At any rate, since you’re stationed here in D.C. it shouldn’t be so inconvenient for you to stop by my office on occasion to update me when you’re not elsewhere, such as on the West Coast protecting our diminutive heroes.”

All three of them stood up and Chris left the White House. After she exited, Mitchell protested to the President, averring “We can get her to tell what she knows.”

The President glared at him sternly and replied, “Arnold, permit me to remind you that General Curtis Lemay advocated nuclear war, but thankfully the President disregarded this view, and that General Westmoreland repeatedly prevaricated in his reports to LBJ, resulting in our suffering tens of thousands of unnecessary casualties in Nam – and I shouldn’t need to remind you about the expensive Iraq debacle. Based on that track record, I’m inclined at this stage of to trust the judgment of these two agents that I believe are motivated by good old fashioned American common decency, and I might add, common sense. To hell with intrigue and machinations.”

“It goes without saying, Mr. President, that I won’t interfere with your policy in the slightest.

I’m not part of any cabal of recalcitrant right-wingers who think nothing of undermining your orders. And I hope it goes without saying that I have the highest respect for you and your judgment.”

The President smiled and said, “I appreciate you saying that, Arnold, especially bearing in mind the fact that we were once college roommates. But if you don’t mind, I’ll still be careful not to turn my back towards you when you’re in the room. By the way, I’m dissatisfied with your report me about this heroic physicist, Klaus Radder, for instance it doesn’t mention if he remembers rescuing Dorman and Donovan.”

Mitchell pulled a document out of his briefcase and slid it onto the President’s desk while saying, “I have an addendum to that report based on a transcript of a phone conversation between Dorman and Radder. He evidently does remember his rescue of her and Donovan on a distant planet. I’ve been promised more information about Radder this afternoon.”

“Please have a more elaborate one on my desk by this time tomorrow with expanded biographical information about him – what you gave me is woefully inadequate. I gather you don’t regard him as a potential security threat?”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far because what we know about him thus far comes from these same two NSA agents Dorman and Donovan who are dancing circles around us about the boys who evidently had and may still have a miracle device.”

“So basically you’re saying you have nothing? That’s not acceptable, Arnold. Go ahead and drop into the meeting ahead of me, I need to write myself some notes about Agent Dorman before I forget everything she told me that didn’t sound like total malarky. I’ll only be a few minutes late.”

The fact that several protagonists of the bizarre events couldn’t remember all of them didn’t change the President’s belief in their verity because there were plenty of eyewitnesses who swore to having been present and observed the miraculous phenomena. Just outside the grounds of the White House, Chris called Jorge and told him, “It went okay with the President, Jorge. He seemed skeptical about our reports, but overall he was really nice.”

“Glad to hear it, so maybe I won’t be raked over the coals when I see him.”

Chris replied, “And then again you might, but let’s hope you’re not. Let me know how it goes, see you soon.” and then she abruptly hung up because she had rush for a flight back to San Francisco.

Chapter 3: A Penitent Klaus Radder Klaus Radder returned to 2013 at the precise moment that he previously left it minus a year, which meant there may be two of him at the current calendar date. When he eventually learned from Joey that he had also bounced forward and back in time, taking a tour of the sun’s core along the way, he asked him if there could be two of him now but Joey said that as far as he knew he reappeared at the same moment that he left and on his return he was standing on the same exact location and surveying the same scene as when he shot forward in time. Joey could find this out if he wanted to because many people present when he disappeared had time pieces such as cell phones, and videographers at the scene had time stamps in their cameras, but he didn’t have any curiosity about it so he had never asked anybody about how temporally precise When he appeared in 2013, Klaus was too occupied with darkness, his strange surroundings and train conductors to immediately check his watch, but later as he was trudging on an open road in the dead of night he looked at his watch that he had continued to wear in spite of the same information being available on any 2089 New Modernity wall; and he when he did, he saw on his watch a date that he later confirmed in Amsterdam, so it had adjusted on his rearrival because of its satellite connection. He couldn’t remember the date of his sudden departure from Senegal to compare that of his rearrival to it and didn’t learn it until he spoke to Joey, who disappeared to the future at almost the same moment as he did.

Unlike Joey, Klaus had no interest in returning to the same location because he knew while he was in the future that the cliff had collapsed and if he returned to it at the same moment he would have been crushed by it, so he calibrated his return to be distant from his original location but did it haphazardly because he was mortally ill from asbestos poisoning, so he was fortunate he didn’t wind up in the middle or the ocean or embedded in a solid object such as a retaining wall. His experience could be like with Joey, who disappeared from Senegal and reappeared in the same moment and location and therefore didn’t become a duplicate of himself, but it was possible that because of Klaus’ return to a different place and even a different continent and an earlier time than the one he left, he also existed in Europe in a version that didn’t follow the same trajectory that wound him up in Senegal. Furthermore, his anomalies that had sent him through time and space had during other activations behaved in ways that he hadn’t anticipated or subsequently been able to explain, so all bets were off. He was still experiencing the memory haze that had diminished but stubbornly persisted to some extent since his reappearance, but he thought he had a vague recollection of being in Lucerne before he was sent off to Senegal; and also that he was an accountant for a while, so it was theoretically possible that’s what he was doing right now in Switzerland, still working under his real name Knut Reffner in Lucerne before he created his new identity and name out of sheer ennui when he went MIA on purpose and started a new life. Amazingly, over a few days of realtime that covered a calendar century he had seen himself reviled as the worst villain of all time by people who were aware of the apocalyptic calamities he brought on the world – and even on worlds – and then soon after his return to 2014 he found himself hailed as a hero by the same people who had condemned him as a the worst villain in history after he rescued Chris, Jorge and their fellow astronauts.

After he rescued the future astronauts Klaus closed up his laser lab south of San Francisco and reoriented his life, switching to work at home pursuing theoretical physics anew – but this time with projects that had only beneficent applications as opposed to the unprecedented weapons that he was going to – in a misfortunate future – unleash on the world and even outside of it. Klaus thereafter steered completely clear of research that could have weapons applications and instead earned a typically high Silicon Valley income by patenting his discoveries for improving information technology. The NSA mothballed his lab, afraid to even turn it over to other U.S. scientists in case there was another unanticipated madman among them who might do something disastrous with it and even reprise the Klaus catastrophes that Lucky was going to cancel; they wanted to take no chances after having dodged a cataclysmic bullet, and told Vernon it would be crated and shipped to the east coast to be examined by top officials under very strict conditions. Eventually, assuming that his full mental and intellectual capacity returned to him, he planned to reformulate his future discoveries such as the Fail-Safe, Anti-Gravity, APD-Wall that was going to revolutionize communications, etc., all of which he knew are going to have strictly peaceful applications but which he knew seventy years and more later hadn’t yet happened.

Theoretically, all of even his new and peaceful technology innovations could be used in some type of negative manner. When he was working on his propulsion project, he had been on the verge of increasing exponentially the power of his already unprecedented acceleration that took his space ship all the way to the nearest star by juicing it with dark matter, but time ran out and he had to initiate the voyage to the stars immediately prior to Chris and Jorge’s nearly ill-fated second launch without it. Had he succeeded in his dark matter calculation, the propulsion upon

being weaponized would have been powerful enough to wipe out the entire solar system in seconds, had he dared to commit such an unspeakable crime – and he had to admit that in that future time he was going to become horrifically trenchant and willing to do it.

Fortunately, because of his change of heart and newfound happiness in the year he was currently in, he was confident based on what his fiancée told him that his future weapons – and the future crises that they were going to cause – would never happen if Lucky made his destined appearance and was going to act as a deus ex machina and undo them. Klaus was gratified of the assurance he derived from his future memories that the APD-Wall theory he developed as a side pursuit was going to be used for universally protective purposes – that is, it was going to be, more than seventy years hence – including such mundane advantages as being able to walk a dog or cat without a leash because a pet could be contained within its invisible border after being tweaked beyond his original version by future scientists. It could even become a template for – God forbid it should ever be needed – the fictional Star Trek force field that protected the Star Ship Enterprise from blasts by enemy aliens, except that APD-Wall wouldn’t diminish in strength no matter how many times it was blasted; so there wouldn’t be an Irishman shouting from the engine room I need more power, Captain! Klaus knew that this wouldn’t be one of the applications for it early into the 22st Century because he remembered that there had been no space hostilities at that point in the future and none were anticipated. Although a force was going to seize and hold Chris and Jorge and their mates on a distant planet, their ship’s brain was going to conclude that it wasn’t hostile towards them and was acting defensively. He also felt satisfaction that his Anti-Gravity was going to blossom into flying vehicles that will help eliminate pollution as well as gruesome auto accidents, and also permit pedestrians to walk around without fear of being mowed down by a drunk or reckless driver.

This new and devoted absorption in benevolent work didn’t leave Klaus bereft of human association as when he was isolated for months inside the bowels of a Senegal cliff with only a taciturn security guard for company. He began to appreciate people for the first time, acquiring a raft of friends after moving to California and dramatically snapping out of his psychopathy, as his personality transformed from that of a trenchant misanthrope to full joviality and thankful appreciation of his newfound comity.. His new friends were mostly folks he met at a local San Mateo church where he lived south of San Francisco that in spite of his retention of his life-long atheism he was regularly attending because of its calming effect on him and his admiration for its members; several of whom he was exchanging personal visits with at his home and theirs – especially the woman who introduced him to the church after he happened to converse with her at a local organic produce market. In addition to his church friends he had acquired a personal coterie that included Joey, Kurt and their families and Chris and Jorge, who unlike him had no future memory of him rescuing them; but they did recognize him as their friend nonetheless when Joey, who like him did remember the rescue, brought them to meet Klaus. When he married a lady he met at church just before his forty-third birthday Joey and his family and pals were all in attendance, including but before he married Mabel Morgenthal he had a frank discussion with her. One day, he wondered out loud in conversations with her if God had sent him and that woman to the same place to meet and cure him of his murderous insanity and also to give him the opportunity to redeem himself after his murderous future, but she replied that this was for God to know and him to pray about; and he rejoined that he totally respected her view but he

wasn’t yet a type to pray about anything; and yet, the concept of God doing good but not always explaining it and leaving his reasons a mystery had some appeal for him. Before he married his wife, Klaus told her, “Mabel, sometimes a man has a shady past that he needs to divulge to his fiancée. I don’t have one, in fact my past though somewhat peppered with minor disputes is otherwise impeccably scholastic, but what I have is an extremely shady future, a horrendously destructive one.”

“You mean when you will create a superaccelerant and destroy planets?”

“How do you know about that?” asked Klaus, astonished.

“You talk about it in your sleep almost every night. I haven’t mentioned this to you until now because I didn’t know if it would help you if I did or just depress you further. I also know that you feel remorse for what you are going to do, so I don’t feel that it reflects the character of the Klaus Radder that I know and love. Don’t worry about it, honey. That future will never happen because you have already firmly decided to not do any of it.”

Klaus contemplated her words, which soothed him no end and made him even more determined to marry her if she would have him because he knew he would feel lost without her wisdom to guide him after so many years of internecine introspection. As simple, logical and straightforward as her advice was, the thought that he himself would be able to prevent that future from happening had somehow escaped him; that future had been so vivid and undeniable in his memories that it had never occurred to him that it could be prevented by anyone other than Lucky by reversing the effects of everything he did. If something was going to envelop and seize a ship nearly a hundred years later on a planet trillions of miles from Earth, he would disperse it with his laser, this had been all he knew. The ship’s brain had detected no attempt by the force to damage or destroy the ship, so it was never definitively determined to be hostile and may have been simply protecting its own environment from a perceived interloper. The earlier violent cleavage of the ship from a cargo carrier and the minor damage to its electronic brain while it was en route to that distant solar system had turned out to be the consciously inadvertent but unconsciously purposeful work of Klaus himself via his specially configured laser; evidently motivated by a personal animosity towards Chris and Jorge that he no longer harbored; in fact, they were among his best friends. Klaus noted that the characteristics of both of these phenomena weren’t altogether different from those of his plethora of anomalies that he spread around the U.S. willy-nilly, one of which he draped over a San Francisco building that surprised him by not only sealing it, but also by preventing damage to glass windows it covered even when they were struck with a sledgehammer; this meant that it had permeated the glass – an unexpected effect.

This feature became a peculiarity for him to shelve as an unexplained mystery alongside the streaks of bursts that turned into strange objects looking like ferris wheels and medieval maces before returning back into streaks just before hitting the earth’s surface and destroying a village in India; a destruction that Lucky eventually reversed along with all of the other devastations caused by Klaus when he was infamously known as an evil scientist.

Chapter 4: An Interdimensional Excursion Joey and his sister Natalie and his teenage brother Paul along with Kurt and Joey’s girl

friend Jane Fárah decided to visit Great America to try out some rides there for the first time in a couple of years; Jane and Natalie’s favorite Great America ride was water rafting, whereas Joey and Paul preferred the more exhilarating Top Gun. Their friends and family let them go off without them, knowing that a pair of federal marshals would ride in the next car of the Santa Clara right rail that took them directly there, keeping their distance so as not to cause the intrepid trio to feel harried; additional marshals would tag along in cars; three other cars where nearby on call. After another raging battle in the NSA, the decision had been made to not covertly eavesdrop on the kids because if they discovered it with the help of someone like their own agent Chris Dorman whom they suspected of being some kind of turncoat, there could be serious blowback from them in spite of their youth; they had displayed considerable determination and independence and the NSA had already failed to make any progress on the miracle phenomenon when they kidnapped Kurt, so pushing their luck at this point seemed inadvisable.

As they rode in the train Natalie asked, “Joey, you said this morning you were going to show me something cool on the way.”

“Oh yeah, I’m getting so used to cool things that Lucky does I almost forgot about it. But he’s playing sleepy head since yesterday, so I don’t know if I can show you. Okay, there’s one.

See that guy over there wearing the orange sweat suit?”

“Yes, what about him?”

“Watch him.”

As they watched, the man started to fade and finally disappeared altogether, and Jane asked, “Huh? What happened, was he zapped with a laser? Did Lucky kill him?”

“No, nothing like that. He’s gone now because he was never really here. I started seeing these folks a couple of weeks ago but nobody else can see them unless I want them to. And Lucky has some way I don’t understand of explaining stuff that he does to me, and he shows me slang now which he didn’t used to do at all. For instance, he says stuff like Yo dude! He even spoke to me one time in a weird gravelly voice.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, Okay toots! which I think is something you say to a girl, not a boy so he has a ways to go in learning how to talk. Anyway, believe it or not, that guy we’re looking at is from a different dimension, that’s why he came and went. Other people can’t even see him, a couple of times I saw somebody sit right on top of a dimension guy and he just vanished.”

“From another dimension? You mean like a parallel universe, like that movie about a duplicate Earth?”

“That’s it exactly. And there’s a bunch of them, but some of them are way different from Earth, you’ll have to see them to believe them. I didn’t tell you until I found out more about it.

Do you want to visit another dimension now?”

Natalie asked, “Wow, we can go to one and still get back in one piece and in time to go to Great America?”

“Sure, I already did it a few times, it’s perfectly safe because Lucky controls it. Are you ready … for Monday Night Football?”

“But we’re only two stops from Great America.”

“That doesn’t matter because we’ll come back to the same exact moment in time where we were when we left. Ready?”

Paul said, “I’m ready, this sounds like more fun than a barrel of iPads.”

Joey took Lucky out of his pocket and told him, “Lucky, take us to another dimension, please.”

Natalie said, “Wait! Those marshals will notice us being gone if we don’t come back exactly to this time and they’ll call our folks and freak them out.”

“Don’t worry about that, Natalie, they’ll never know we went anywhere because Lucky will freeze time all around them, but this will be a wild ride, so be ready for anything. Okay, let’s go, Lucky.”

A split second later, the three of them found themselves standing on a platform of the same light rail with a train stopped directly in front of them. But Natalie said she felt disoriented, “What’s going on, Joey. I feel discombobulated, like I’m going to fall over. I think we need to get out of here and go back right away.”

Joey said, “Yeah, check it out, we’re sideways! But you’ll get used to it in a few minutes, I had the same feeling but got adjusted to it.”

“Sideways? What do you mean we’re sideways?”

“I mean just that. You can’t get over feeling discombobulated because this dimension doesn’t have people standing straight up like in ours. Everybody here is sideways, we’re standing horizontal, not vertical.”

“How do you know that?”

“Think about the people in China. If you could see through the planet all the way to China, you would see the soles of their feet, right?”

“I never thought about that, but I guess it’s true.”

Smiling broadly, Paul said, “I bet you’d see more than just their shoes!” and Natalie slapped him on the shoulder, protesting, “Paul, stop it! But anyway, what does that have to do with standing horizontal? If we were suddenly transported to China would we feel like we’re upside down? That’s not how gravity works.”

“I don’t know, maybe. Being in a sideways dimension isn’t something you can understand right away. I figured it out after spending a couple of hours here by myself before.”

Joey showed Natalie the image still on Lucky’s face and she responded, “Oh yeah, I didn’t notice it before. Look, Paul.”

Paul looked at the image and said, “Oh right, I didn’t see that either, the word sideways is sideways.”

Joey turned Lucky on and said, “That’s right, only if the word sideways is at the bottom like normal are the people in the picture not sideways.”

Natalie said, “Is that train the one we were on? I don’t see duplicates of us in it but I don’t want to see that, so don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about it, I’m just curious.”

“It’s not exact duplication. I was in Freddie’s room at his house when I did it once and I found myself standing next to a public swimming pool twenty miles away. And he also found himself is a very scary place another time that he asked me not to tell people about, I don’t know why.”

“Freddie Shapiro?”

“Yeah, that’s the only Frank I ever talk about.”

Okay, I’ve had enough of this, let’s go back, pleeeeeease, Joey. I’m really getting a lot of

vertigo from this and it’s not getting better like you said it would.”

Suddenly they were sitting in the light rail car again in San Jose. Natalie shook her head as if her hair was soaked with water, to clear it after the befuddling experience.

Joey said, “Now’s the time to show you some more dimensions, but they won’t be as weird as that one. You wanna try them?”

Jane asked, “What do you mean dimensions – like the multiple dimensions besides the three normal ones … I think it’s like, time and space and the speed of light that Einstein talked about?

I’m more into bioscience, I don’t know much about physics.”

“Yeah, I took Freddie to several dimensions because he’s a genius and I knew he would get a kick out of them. Not that the average schmuck wouldn’t also … no offense, of course.”

Paul asked, “You told Freddie and took him to these dimensions before you did it with your own brother and sister? That’s cold Joey, I thought we were your home boys … and girls.”

“I had to tell Freddie about it because he pinned me down one time at his house and I couldn’t get away from him. He was po’d about me having Lucky while he was telling me about that physics nano stuff that he thought was so fantastic but even while he was telling me about it I had something way better in my pocket but didn’t tell him. So I gave him the first tour anybody got when he challenged me and didn’t believe what Lucky could do, but later he wasn’t all that happy about it, in fact he almost punched me out. So you guys are the second and third, that’s not so bad, is it? And anyway, that particular one is really cool but it might not be a tour that you would enjoy. He was even more po’d at me after I sent him there than he was before it.”

Natalie said, “Why is that? Oh … Never mind, let’s just go to Great America right now, I’m dizzy as a loon and still freaked about that place we just saw. You said I would get over it in a few minutes, so if I don’t I’m gonna sue you for false advertising Joey, even if you are my beloved little brother.”

“Ha! Try proving it in court, sis!”

The kids laughed and then proceeded to Great America and returned home together three hours later, with the federal marshals in tow, two of them in the next train car and two of them driving alongside it. After dinner, Kurt arrived and he and the three siblings and Jane gathered in Paul’s room, which was the biggest bedroom in their Palo Alto house, to experience more – and according to Natalie’s vow, her last – inter-dimensional journeys. Joey decided to tease her, “Natalie, there’s one dimension where deviled eggs actually have two red horns sticking out of them. You wanna see it?”

“No-thank-you-very-much! I’m not sure I want to see much more of any of this, but for sure no devils or any other bad things, okay?”

“Girls are so squeamish.”

“Stop with the gender slurs Joey, we girls defend ourselves from boys like you, this isn’t the th 20 century.”

“Sheesh, don’t get so uppity. Last chance, you sure?”

“C’mon, Joey.” Paul said, “What you really got for us? How about a Superman dimension where everybody can fly and stuff.”

“Lucky says there’s a dimension for everything you can imagine including a Superman dimension, but I don’t think you girls will like it so much because guys are throwing each other around worse than a UFC fight, so I’ll show that one to Paul later. You don’t really need me to

pick one out, we can just take another tour like we did this afternoon if you like and I’ll tell you where we are while we’re there like I did before, and we’ll be perfectly safe. When we get to these places Lucky usually doesn’t even put text on his screen like he used to do, I understand everything no matter how weird it looks, like Lucky is able to make me understand without even using any words.”

Suddenly, they found themselves standing on the sidewalk of what looked like a normal city, though one none of them recognized. Thick-bodied pedestrians wearing no clothes walked past them as they gazed around at the buildings, which seemed to morph and change shapes as they looked at them.”

Natalie asked Joey, “Wow, are those their bodies or some kind of tight suits?”

“Those are their bodies. Even though they have arms and legs like us their bodies don’t have the shapes we have, as you can see they’re more like plastic tubes.”

“What are those plumes of floating around just above the ground?”

“Those are souls, or at least we would call them that. When people die here and leave their bodies they just float around. Lucky hasn’t told me if they can think, or what. You see that big round building? The souls are sucked into some type of machine in there, sent to a distant planet and put into new bodies. Their friends and relatives then get the option of joining them. When they die again, the same is done with them. These people have like, millions of planets to put people on, so there’s no overcrowding from doing this, at least not yet. Nobody around can see the smoke souls, only us.”

“Wow, I wonder if that means we have those on Earth but we can’t see them either.”

“That’s right, and folks here could see ours if they visited Earth, but we can’t implant our floating souls in new bodies like they can.”

“Well, I sure hope our scientists get on the ball. I don’t want to end up floating around uselessly when I die. In fact, I hope we do better than these guys and don’t have to die at all.”

“That’ll be a long time from now. Look how far ahead of us these guys are and they can’t do that. Okay, now we’re going to another dimension that you’ll get a kick out of.”

They found themselves standing on a sidewalk in a different city, and Natalie said, “Hey, that’s Bob Dylan!”

Joey smiled and said, “You’re right, but look around you.”

“Wow, that guy is another Dylan double!”

“Keep looking.”

“Oh my God! Those three guys across the street look just like him too! Why does everybody look like Dylan?”

“We’re in a Dylan dimension where everybody really is Bob Dylan, they don’t just look like him.”

“But how and why did this happen? And where are the women? Dylan is a man, how do they make new Dylans?”

“They just get generated, and they never get old anyway so there’s no loss, but I don’t know if they die. If they didn’t I suppose there would be millions of them sooner or later instead of the few we’re seeing, but maybe not. And it’s true about us too. Every one of us has a dimension that’s nothing but copies of each one of us.”

“And here I was so excited about seeing Bob Dylan, but now I want to get out of here before

I’m literally bored to death. Don’t they get bored also, seeing nothing but themselves 24 hours a day?”

Paul interjected, “I bet they don’t get bored because they don’t know anything different. You have to be aware of variety to appreciate it or miss it. Right, Joey?”

“That’s right. Okay, now check this one out.”

An instant later they were standing in a municipal park and could see buildings not far away from them surrounding it. But the people walking along the park paths near them were appearing and disappearing.

Natalie asked, “What’s this, why are they doing that? Are they real?”

Joey replied, “They’re real. Remember the guy in the Santa Clara light rail who disappeared? He was from this dimension. These people fade in and out of a buncha different dimensions including ours, but this is their home. I don’t know anything about their lives, such as whether they grow and cook food and all that stuff, but I suppose they still do it while they’re here and only fade out now and then to another place.”

“How do they live like that, are they used to it?”

“I guess so. I got another weird place we can visit next. How about one where time is reversed from us? It’s really weird, everybody was walking backwards when I got there and I looked at a man sitting at an outside table who was taking stuff out of his mouth with a fork and it turned into a chicken leg on his plate. Then he took it inside where I’m sure he gave it to the waiter who took it to the kitchen and there it was unfried or uncooked and taken out of the restaurant as raw meat that goes back to the butcher where it becomes a live chicken.”

Natalie protested, “As weird as the stuff is that you’ve shown us, I don’t believe there’s a place like that, you have to be making it up. Enough already, I don’t want to see it or any more of dimensions, including real vampires and werewolves. And anyway, how do you know this is all real and isn’t some kind of hallucination Lucky is putting us into?”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that about Lucky, Natalie. I thought you knew he wouldn’t do that.”

Paul said, “Joey’s right, Natalie, Lucky wouldn’t do that. But she’s also right, Joey. Enough is enough. Let’s go home and stay there. We can see vampires and werewolves another day, if ever.”

Instantly they were back in Paul’s room and their inter-dimensional travels were at an end.

Chapter 5: Mindpower in Heidelberg When Knut Reffner arrived in Heidelberg and began setting up his propulsion research lab authorized and funded by his boss, the CEO of Anstedt Technologies Rudolf Kaufmann and a reputed billionaire, he informed his workmate in the lab Ronald Steger, a physics graduate student and researcher who came with him to help him set up his lab in Heidelberg from Berlin where Reffner had been working for Kaufmann as a highly regarded accountant when Kaufmann accidentally learned about his physics prowess and his original theory about propulsion, that he should call Reffner by his real name and that Klaus Radder was a pseudonym he had adopted when he considered publication of several scientific papers that he expected to be controversial and possibly adversely impact his reputation under his real name. This was a total fabrication,

but he needed some kind of excuse for giving up his pseudonym that was actually part of his escape from Heidelberg before becoming bored and changing his name and becoming a missing person to start a new life as Klaus Radder; he doubted that his lab assistant would question his concocted explanation as long as they were paid, and none of them did because he was a brusque character with whom they would have no reason to engage in conversation about such a matter if they valued their jobs.

He was again becoming bored, this time with his placid life in Heidelberg, not because of his surroundings that were wonderful and even idyllic but rather because of the limitations on his work. Kaufmann had promised him virtually carte blanche funding for his research project but hadn’t yet delivered any of at least four more assistants that he needed five weeks after Reffner’s arrival in Switzerland. Reffner was badly in need of technologists because he knew precious little about writing software, and certainly not enough about it to create the programs that would apply mathematical calculations for his main machine, a sonar generator that he hoped would inexpensively test his preliminary theories for extracting solar energy to convert into propulsion.

He had studied software writing briefly but gave it up after became frustrated by the fact that a single bracket or semicolon among hundreds or thousands of characters rendered a program completely useless; which is a mistake he repeatedly made, whereas when he worked on mathematical equations he never ran into this problem. Reffner was never one to be toyed with and was becoming more impatient every day, but he didn’t have the funds to hire his own assistants, so his hands were tied.

Meanwhile, Reffner plodded along as best he could with Steger as his only assistant, an intern who had agreed to suspend his graduate work for a year to work in Reffner’s lab but had wound up with little in the way of duties to perform in it, yet seemed relatively sanguine about it.

Reffner was nobody’s fool and suspected he could be a stooge who may be receiving a bigger salary than his own from Kaufmann to spy on his work; but this didn’t annoy him, partly because he knew this was typical of how the game was played in the cutthroat world of technology; and also because he was confident that the young man was incapable of fully grasping the complex equations Reffner wrote on a white erase board – which he granted was an old fashioned practice, but the one he preferred – or how to apply them to practical science. Some of Steger’s errors in his transcriptions of Reffner’s calculations into digital form of were so egregious that Reffner concluded early on that he couldn’t possibly be comprehending the work. As a result, Reffner found he had to carefully review the intern’s transcriptions of his perfectly legible hand scripted calculations into digital form because he repeatedly found mistakes in them that he, Reffner, had not deliberately inserted in them; but he never reprimanded Steger both because he didn’t want him to know he was detecting his errors and because he might resign and force him to search for a replacement whose Kaufmann may balk at funding. Reffner also weighed in the fact that he had been described in writing by his co-workers who had status that was equal to his at MIT as insufferably tendentious, so it would be easy for him to fall into a trap of impetuously lording it over Steger because he was his underling. Just to be safe rather than sorry, to preserve his exclusivity of possession of his accurate calculations, after completing each calculation Reffner incorrected several characters in it and after Steger transcribed it Reffner copied the digital version onto his secure laptop that he personally purchased locally and corrected the characters from his carefully guarded hand-written notes. Reffner didn’t regard this

camouflaging as tedious because it only took up about an extra half hour a week and also because he considered it to be a normal part of life in modern society and probably in all past societies as well.

After weeks of a snail’s pace progress on his propulsion project, Reffner began working only part time on it and began spending more and more time on side principles. He didn’t even bother to inform Kaufmann, who hadn’t called Reffner in weeks and had requested no progress reports in months, of his diversion from his propulsion work. Unable to make significant progress on his propulsion theorem without assistants to run his formulas through computer models, Reffner cast about for something altogether different. He delved seriously into a study of anti-gravity, perpetual youth, disease contagion and universal communications and spent months on all of them until one night he had a dream in which he read a landmark New York Times article in which an unnamed and evidently as yet unidentified man that the story labeled an evil scientist – which Reffner regarded as an absurd oxymoron – had attained astounding accomplishments that were recovered from his computer after he died in a cliff collapse in Africa. In the remarkably elaborate dream, the work was reported in the Times as having been analyzed by top scientists and who preliminarily described it as solutions to all of four topics that Reffner had spent so much time studying. In the dream he was incredulous that anybody could accomplish all of this before him and of the totally disparate and yet the exact same problems that he was studying; and especially galling was that it was done in Africa where there were no advanced scientific labs of note; but the claims were published in an authoritative scientific publication, the front cover of which he saw in his dream instead of the Times, and although he didn’t open it he was nevertheless aware of its contents; the illogical switch from the Times cover to the journal and his familiarity with its contents even though he hadn’t actually examined them were examples of a flawed sequence of events that he knew frequently and occurs in dreams; such as when a person dreams that he or she is standing on the upper floor of a high rise and a moment later is crossing a street without having left the building. Such a dream often and – perhaps always – provokes bewilderment after they wake up even in people who are perfectly aware of the chronic irrationality of dreams. At any rate, due to the premonition he had while speaking to Kaufmann he took it seriously because it was so vivid and decided to avoid cliffs in the future; and he also suspended the projects and looked around another, totally different mathematical pursuit. He preserved all of his seminal work, deciding that he could always return to it later if there were no subsequent nightmares.

Reffner’s dilemma went from bad to worse when Kaufmann called him three months after he opened his new lab to insist that he move his work out of Europe because the German government and more problematically Interpol were breathing down Kaufmann’s neck or may soon do so about a matter in the U.S. that he didn’t describe and about which Reffner had no curiosity. As he listened, to this Reffner asked silently, Out of Europe? Where to, Africa?

Kaufmann intimated ominously that he may be forced to shut down Reffner’s lab if he didn’t cooperate and move it. During the conversation Reffner had a powerful premonition that this move would turn out badly for him if he did it, so he didn’t even ask for time to consider it and instead flatly refused. Reffner had always considered himself an extreme rationalist not given to hunches or premonitions, but this one was so strong and came on the heels of his remarkable dream, so he decided there could be something serious going on and chose to heed it. Evidently

Kaufmann had relented on closing or stultifying the lab because when Reffner ordered equipment and supplies from Anstedt during the ensuing months he continued to receive them; it was also possible that Kaufmann was so distracted by whatever his U.S. plight was that he neglected to seal off the equipment pipeline to Reffner. Unknown to Reffner, Kaufmann was roiled by an Interpol investigation of his activities after a team he sent to kidnap Kurt had miserably failed and returned to Europe. As a result, he had no current interest in anything that Reffner was doing. Reffner didn’t hear from his boss during the several weeks after the demand of a move and had to call him to speak to him; however, Kaufmann’s great initial enthusiasm for Reffner’s ideas seemed to have escaped from him as air escapes from a punctured balloon, because when he did consent to speak to Reffner by phone he sounded uninspired – neither informatively nor affirmatively responding to anything Reffner said to him – and then after hearing out Reffner’s spiel about his needs without commenting about any of it he wearily repeated his claim that assistants would be hired and on their way to him as soon as possible and to please be patient as he was currently overwhelmed by some kind of crisis that he needed to get out of the way before he could renew his focus to the Heidelberg project.

Reffner became intrigued about human brain patterns after reading about them in Discover Magazine and a new bizarre dream among the many that continued to plague him suggested what seemed an impossible hypothetical, that targeting a single nearly microscopic synapse with a sound pulse of a precise wave length would cause a ripple effect that would potentize a human brain to reach power levels heretofore unprecedented, in effect creating a mental and perhaps psychic superman. This was a notion that was far outside of any box within the scientific study of synapses and made no sense on its face. He decided to take this new dream seriously in spite of its nearly absurd implausibility, as it was as powerful as his previous ones that appeared to be genuine harbingers. He visited the website of the Journal of Electroencephalography where he learned that there was currently an impasse in an important effort to solve how socio- and psycho- pathology developed. Blithely unaware that he was an exemplar of such abnormality himself, he decided to try to adapt his sonar equipment to examining neurological principles including the origination of aberrancies with a goal in mind of creating one that would be favorable; but he first had to teach himself how to use his equipment since it was clear that its trained operators were not forthcoming as promised by the dithering CEO for whom he had been previously grateful but for whom he was now beginning to feel contempt.

He early on though tentatively concluded while reading about neurological synapses that they might indeed be forcefully affected by precisely frequenced sonar pulses that would radiate to at least a hundred thousand of their siblings, and his calculations indicated that this frequencing may be within the parameters of his sonar radiator to muster, though only if it was adapted with other equipment and reprogrammed – while retaining its integrity for its original purpose in case Kaufmann stopped vacillating and arose from his doldrums to give the funding of recruitment of crucial assistants the green light. Reffner felt no moral or ethical compunctions about misleading if he told him that additional technical sonar assistants he requested from him would be used for the propulsion project, but since he couldn’t even get him to send him help for his propulsion research it wasn’t likely that he would to be able to snow him into providing them for something else. The good news was that the reprogramming should be far less complex than the propulsion work, so hiring the assistants he would need for his neuro sideline may be

affordable with his own considerable savings. Reffner hoped that the new equipment requisition would slip under the Kaufmann’s radar, as he was clearly preoccupied with other matters, but it if was rejected Reffner could afford to pay for it himself.

He looked up prices on the Internet and found that he would be able to purchase more discrete equipment for under eight thousand Euros, as radiating the wavelengths he needed was within the capability of most standard devices; fortunately, his new equipment was approved and arrived within two weeks in three shipments. He next ordered a less crucial and surprisingly inexpensive EEG helmet that it manufacturer claimed to have a very high temporal resolution and had originally designed it for both educational experiments and computer games, which meant that Kaufmann’s staff might flag it or require an explanation of the purpose of requesting it, suspecting it was being ordered as a recreational device. However, it wasn’t challenged and also arrived quickly by UPS at Reffner’s lab; if it did its job he would be able to monitor his brain changes in his own lab instead of inconveniently having to travel outside it. Although he would begin to notice a beneficent effect sooner or later, an EEG should provide much greater advanced notice so that he could surmise whether he was completely wasting his time or needed to change something such as the wavelength of the radiation. One big hurdle Reffner still faced to accomplish his neuro research was that he was a theoretical physicist, not a hardware or software man and needed specialists for this type of work who weren’t forthcoming from his boss. As far as human subjects to test with the newly devised apparatus went, he lacked a license for seeking out volunteers or paid subjects for experiments and had no prospect of obtaining one; and couldn’t risk the government coming down on him if he did it without legal authorization.

But he had himself and his own brain, if he could determine in advance an exceedingly high probability of no harm occurring to him; he believed in his work but he wasn’t reckless or suicidal – he would take all necessary precautions to avoid injuring himself.

Reffner again turned to the Internet to look for an expert programmer because he had plenty of his own substantial savings, free rent at his Heidelberg home that Kaufmann bought for him, and his – thus far – continuing salary from the evidently distracted Kaufmann far away in Berlin; and the programmer would be far less expensive than the ones he needed for his long-term propulsion project. Reffner needed to hire a temp engineer to do the programming adjustments to his sonar devices and consolidate them for him into a single function; otherwise they wouldn’t individually have the potency to achieve Reffner’s technological objective. Reffner spent hours perusing the LinkedIn bios and résumés of programming engineers and eventually sent inquiry emails to several of them and then settled on a Brit with an Oxford degree named Ernest Raddison as his best preliminary candidate; he sent Radisson more details about his prospective needs and asked him for an estimate of how much he would charge for his services; but he only informed him that he needed a steady and precise wave length and not about its purpose. He and Raddison exchanged multiple emails before the Englishman agreed to accept round trip plane fare to visit Reffner’s lab; however, he cautioned Reffner in advance that he didn’t really understand what he was trying to do with the equipment’s software but was willing to spend a day in Heidelberg having a look at it and see if he could give it a go. Raddison wound up spending many hours every day for two weeks going over Reffner’s equipment software only to conclude at the end that he considered himself incapable of writing a program that would finesse the hurdles necessary to be overcome in order to provide a relatively glitch-free result, and

suggested that it could be a waste of money to hire him only to wind up with repeatedly halting programs that may provide more frustration than desirable outcomes.

After considering this bad news Reffner nevertheless authorized Radisson to proceed, hoping his work could have at least heuristic value or better yet, could be cleaned up by a second programmer who analyzed it from a different perspective. Raddison completed the task and Reffner paid him, with Raddison agreeing to provide follow-up remote analysis via computers after he returned to England. In the end, Raddison’s work led Radder to conclude that the equipment wouldn’t need an amplifier but was incapable of unidirecting a sound wave at a tiny locus as small as a single synapse, though it did ominidirectionally muster the precise frequency that Radder required for the effect he envisioned. He pondered whether to search on the Internet for a more discrete uniradiator but decided it may be too expensive for him even if he found one, and after exchanging emails with brain experts who informed him they were aware of no reasons why occasional and instant bursts of simple sound waves would cause injury, he decided instead to go ahead and try to ephemerally wash his entire brain with the radiation and see there was any change in his brain patterns afterwards; this was a radical departure from his dream, but he didn’t see why the effect would be any different with radiation than with specific targeting. He knew it was a bit of a dubious effort since there were no reports of workers dealing with sonar becoming intellectual superheroes, but he also knew that few if any of them were exposed to the precise wavelength that he had seen in his dream and now had available to him with his admittedly primitive sonar gear.

Reffner visited an EEG lab at a local hospital where he presented his scientific credentials and a fictitious brain research schemata that he worked up for only that purpose; and truthfully explained that he himself would be the sole initial subject of the experimental research. He wasn’t interested in lying to his doctor with claims of headaches so that the hospital’s testing would be covered by his private insurance and chose instead to pay for testing of his own brain patterns out of pocket after learning that it was affordable. At some point he would prefer to have an advanced electroencephalography device if the EEG helmet turned out to not be up to the job, to monitor pattern changes so he wouldn’t have to venture out of his own lab for repeated testing but this would be very problematic because he may have to order a one-ton magnet or expensive shielding for an isolated room. Another advantage of the helmet was that it eliminated the need for gel electrodes by wirelessly captured full-brain readings, transmitting data via Bluetooth which was on any modern computer including laptops. It was advertised as providing quality data on deep subconscious responses in real time with full-brain home panels and also as having been adopted by a European consortium that Reffner learned had a very sizeable budget in the tens of millions of Euros and was therefore likely to be legitimate. He put his assistant to work on adjusting the sonar device’s parameters based on its manual plus his own criteria and after this was accomplished and the researcher went off to lunch and Reffner sat down on an ordinary office chair next to it wearing the helmet and flipped its switch on and off quickly with a foot switch, knowing that like other such devices it would detect changes in milliseconds, and he donned it anew a second time the next day while devouring a pair of turkey sandwiches for lunch, only to find that there was no significant change in the data from the immediately prior one; he didn’t have a record of his readings that had been confirmed by his first use of the helmet because of an error by his assistant, but he remembered the gist of them and then fixed the

recording problem. He ran it ten more times during the following week with the same lack of result, which wasn’t necessarily unexpected on initiation of the experiment, each time quitting before his assistant was due to return from lunch, resolving to do this for at least the next couple of weeks while otherwise working on other projects. He increased his exposure to fifteen minutes and on the tenth day the helmet registered the first blip of a change in his readings and continued slight changes during the ensuing days, so at that point he again visited the hospital lab which confirmed them; but the technician suggested that it was probably normal divergence and nothing to be concerned about; he didn’t bother to inform the technician that it was actually his aspiration when he visited the lab was to find changes sufficient to be concerned about – albeit positive changes and no negative ones.

This went on for another two weeks with still more minor changes and nothing harmful detected by the hospital lab, and all of them registered also on his helmet, so during the entire following month he stuck with the helmet exclusively, since he had acquired it in the first place was intended to substitute for the expensive and inconvenient lab visits. Near the end of the first month of the sonar self-treatment he that noticed perspicacious insights seemed to come to him more quickly during his mathematical calculations, but it was subtle and perhaps immeasurable; but at least there was no loss or dimunition in his intellect, which was a relief in itself. Then, one morning as he left his home and headed for the lab he thought, Why isn’t Steger there yet? and when he arrived he saw that Steger was indeed late to work for the first time in the nearly two years he had worked in, which he explained was due to a minor auto accident. This caused to wonder how he knew he wasn’t there even before arriving himself and without having heard from him since he saw him the previous day; he couldn’t attribute this presentiment to the sonar treatments at this point, but he suspected as much and felt encouraged to continue with his experiment. The next day Steger approached Reffner as if to say something but before he opened his mouth, Reffner said, “Yes.” and Steger asked, “Yes, what?”

“Yes, you may leave early today to spend extra time with your girl friend.”

“How did you know I was going to ask you that, I’ve never left early before and I’ve never mentioned to you that I have a girl friend.”

“I don’t know, I just knew. She’s ill and you want to leave early to visit her, right?”

“Amazing, you’re absolutely correct.”

“Never mind, maybe some mutual acquaintance we don’t even know we have said something about it to me, but run along now before I change my mind and join your lady friend, I’ll wrap up soon here and leave early also. Have a nice weekend.”

“Indeed, and you as well.”

Steger, who only worked twenty-fours a week due to a reduction of his salary that Kaufmann repeatedly claimed was only temporary, left and Reffner pondered what just occurred; he knew there was no such mutual acquaintance because he spoke to nobody at all about anything beyond the usual weather chit chat, not even the EEG hospital staff, with whom he only discussed brain patterns and equipment for measuring them. He was anti-social and only interested in his work, and Steger was the entirety of his staff, so he never had an occasion for idle conversation about girl friends or any other mundane topic. There were several possible explanations for the two premonitions he had thus far about his lab assistant. It could be that Steger was the one who was psychically projecting the advance information to Reffner, and

maybe had even hacked into Reffner’s computer and undergone the sonar treatments himself in the dead of night. If so, then he may have also copied Reffner’s corrected transcriptions. Reffner closed the lab as he was wont to do these days anyway because he lacked the assistants to get any significant lab work done and was able to do his theoretical work at home. He walked the seven typically attractive residential blocks of the German city towards his home. The next morning when he ate breakfast at his favorite café, he had a science magazine that he was leafing through on the table in front of him, so when the waitress brought his plate she put it in front of the magazine, and when Reffner lifted it the plate slid towards him to its appropriate location for eating from it, seemingly of its own volition; but the waitress didn’t notice this event, having turned and walked away before it occurred.

At first blush Reffner tried to rationalize this oddity, thinking that maybe the table had tilted without him noticing it or something or the sort, but he quickly dismissed the notion because he was sure the table was level, so it wasn’t caused by gravity. He sat staring at the plate for half a minute and then clutched it and slid it away from him a few centimeters and back again towards him, just to make sure it hadn’t become immobile after what may have been – for a plate, if it had volition – an exhausting exercise. He again slid the plate back to where it was before he lifted the magazine and tried to will it to repeat its slide towards him but to no avail as it just sat there, seemingly mocking him by refusing to budge. This strange self-moving plate event killed his interest in reading the magazine or anything else, so he quickly consumed his breakfast and left the restaurant. As he strolled towards the building that housed his lab he mentally sang words from a Bob Dylan song while changing the name in them to his own, Something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Reffner?. All three peculiar events during the previous 24 hours were effects caused by his sonar treatments had startled him, which he had failed to anticipate. At lunch time Steger left the lab as always and Reffner sat down next to the sonar device but it switched itself on before he had a chance to do it himself and then switched off after the fifteen minute timeline that had become part of his modus operandi. So now he was ready to rule out Steger as being the cause of even the first two events that involved him.

Although the helmet’s readings were still showing only slight perturbations in his brain patterns, he was unaware of any reason other than the sonar treatments for him to be experiencing kinetic and premonitory phenomena, but he was dissatisfied with their intensity and decided to try to speed up the process by increasing his exposure to half an hour a day. This was easily within his assistant’s one-hour lunch, but Reffner no longer cared if he exceeded it because he intended to avoid tipping him off about what the treatments were supposed to obtain as he may have inadvertently done when he spoke to him about his girl friend. On his way home after work he felt like he needed a couple of stiff ones to make sure he wasn’t unnerved by what appeared to be effects of his treatments, so he decided to make a rare forage into the bar of a swanky hotel downtown where he had previously encountered a couple of Heidelberg University faculty members, though liberal arts professors rather than scientists with whom he might be able to conduct a meaningful conversation. There was a tv above and behind the bartender showing a live interview of people on the street after some kind of neo-nazi rock-throwing incident and smashed windows, and when a skinhead was approached by a reporter and began ranting about Jews, Reffner became extremely annoyed even though he wasn’t aware of having any Jewish heritage himself, and suddenly the skinhead clutched at his throat and began gasping for breath.

At first Reffner thought the young man was simply having something like an asthma attack, but because of his evident kinetic powers it quickly dawned on him that the cause may be his antipathy towards neo-nazis, so he closed his eyes and said Mother Mary three times, and when re-opened them he heard the skinhead say he seemed to be all right now from some place that was out of view of the reporter’s camera. The reporter apologized about the remarks the skinhead made about Jews and moved on to a middle-aged man who flew into the same kind of rant, which again annoyed Reffner, and this man likewise began gasping for breath.

Reffner immediately gulped down his drink and walked out of the bar and went straight home. Was this a coincidence, that two consecutive interviewees suddenly had trouble breathing, or had Reffner caused their difficulty, and if he did could he actually kill them and if so did one of them leaving the range of the camera and the other his view, save them from him? He decided to put the entire matter behind him and wait for more reliable indicia of his possibly growing powers to surface, for which he didn’t have to wait long. The very next morning he heard a helicopter whirling overhead and looked out of his window on the sixth floor of the building hid lab was in but didn’t see it at first, but as he continued to look outward he saw it come into view about a hundred meters from him and headed away from him. He never did like the sound of helicopters and believed they should be banned from cities except for emergencies, so he looked at it intently while wishing it some kind of unspecified trouble, and suddenly it began swaying wildly and then spiraling downward and even rolled once before Reffner closed his eyes and walked away from the window, hoping he wouldn’t hear the crash of the chopper hitting buildings or the sidewalk, and fortunately he didn’t; a couple of minutes later he stepped back outside and saw to commotion anywhere, including in the direction of where the helicopter was when it went out of control. Later he stopped in at the same hotel bar where he had saw the skinhead interview and again watched the news, which included dramatic footage someone took with a cell phone of the last few seconds of the helicopter’s gyrations before it stabilized and proceeded towards its destination.

The report said that no malfunction had subsequently been found in the helicopter’s mechanics but that it had been grounded pending a more thorough investigation and that local municipal advocates had voiced their opposition to helicopters flying over highly populated areas in the future and had pointed out that dozens or more people were directly below this one who could have been killed or injured if it had crashed. He thought, Don’t worry, it was only an experiment. I won’t do it again. and immediately thereafter he heard his voice saying the same words, coming out of the television. The two news anchors looked at each other with flabbergasted expressions on their faces, and one of them looked around and asked, “What was that?” and then quickly recovered and went to a commercial. Again Reffner gulped down his drink and sped out of the bar in case the bartender might ask him about the similarity between his voice and the one that said those words on the tv; he had exchanged only a couple of dozen words with the bartender during his previous several sojourns to this bar, but it was best to play it safe and immediately exit stage right from the scene of the crime to obviate dealing with any problematic questions from anybody who might have overheard him; he didn’t glance around before leaving the bar to see if anyone was close enough to him to hear him because he didn’t want anybody to return his glance and get a good look at his face. After all, it would be illegal to co-opt a television broadcast if it could be proven, even if done mentally rather than physically

as had occurred once in Los Angeles by someone who was never identified or prosecuted. This was the first time that Reffner was actually pleased rather than surprised by his newfound mental power; he was now convinced that the sonar treatments were indeed working and perhaps accelerating; but he needed more evidence than incidents that theoretically could turn out to be bizarre coincidences, as unlikely as it seemed at this point. The helmet still registered only minor brain pattern changes, and the hospital lab did so as well when he visited it the next day.

He always worked Saturdays while allowing Steger to take every weekend off; the next day was a Sunday when he usually took a leisure train trip to a nearby locale or to Ludwigshafen or even as far as Hamburg or Switzerland, often arriving back to his lab late on Mondays and finding that his sole assistant had opened the lab and was hard at work transcribing or performing some other task prescribed in advance by Reffner. He decided to visit a natural milieu where he could perform a kinetic feat without affecting other humans and hopefully not being noticed by them, and Heidelberg wasn’t a particularly large city. He had never learned how to drive an automobile, so bought an electric scooter, listened to some tips about how to steer it around without crashing into solid objects, and then slowly rode it out of town and along Neckar River about twenty kilometers from his home that Kaufmann had bought for him and from which he could evict him at the drop of hat; to where he knew he could rent a canoe and life vest and set off afloat, looking for islands where he perhaps could ensconce himself to do something extraordinary without witnesses around to notice it. As he floated along on the wide river he saw a flock of birds far in the distance, and seeing no one around who would witness it, he redirected the birds towards him so that within seconds they flew around in a mushroom-shaped circle just a few meters above his head for a few minutes. Having accomplished this, he sent them on their way and then noticed a tree whose roots had largely become exposed by the erosion of the river bank, so again he looked around for possible witnesses and then moved the Mr. Tree first about three meters away from the river, then further and further until it was about ten meters from it. A much larger tree behind it was an obstacle, but rather than collide with it he moved Mr. Tree all the way around it until he couldn’t see it any more.

Anyone who came along would no doubt wonder why there was a deep trench more than fifteen meters long from the river that wound all the way around a tree and ended at the foot of another one, without suspecting how the trench was made; just to tidy up the scene a bit, Reffner lifted mud from the river bottom and filled the trench almost completely with it. Reffner then asked himself, Do I really need to float on the water? and within seconds he was floating in the air two meters above the water and then completely off it and onto the adjacent land, then back onto it; he wasn’t very concerned about someone having seen this because nobody would believe it – even if they captured it on a cell phone camera it would be dismissed as having been faked with editing software, besides which he knew that nobody was close enough to him for him to be identifiable even with a high resolution camera. However, he suddenly felt dizzy and the boat crashed to the ground; he tumbled out of it onto the dirt around it and rolled onto his back and felt totally spent. After lying there for a minute of so, he felt strong enough to sit up, and within minutes he had recuperated sufficiently to drag boat to the river bank and then into the water a few minutes later when he felt strong enough to turn back upstream to return it to the rental outfit and rode his scooter home without further incident. He took a nap and felt none the worse for wear after his over-exertion while he was on the canoe, so he went out in the for a restaurant

dinner and then to look for another candidate for an extraordinary event such as another levitation. Although this wasn’t his first bout with vertigo – he had experienced it about a dozen times during the previous year – long before he started his brain radiations – for reasons that doctors hadn’t been able to diagnose – it was more intense than in the past and seemed likely on this occasion to be related to his mental effort.

He decided against lifting an entire building because it might come down awkwardly and suffer significant structural and possibly irreparable vitiation, so he needed something else that was heavy but which could come down awry but be rightable by workers without suffering intrinsic damage. After leaving his lab and tying up loose ends from it at home, he went out late in the evening for a stroll to see if he encountered an appropriate object to lift or otherwise manipulate. After enjoying a plate of spaghetti in a local diner he roamed around willy-nilly, unconcerned that he might inadvertently complete a circle and wind up close to where he started; the weather was warm and pleasant, so there were lots of Heidelbergers out and about. He was in fit condition compared to other typical middle aged men and an avid outdoorsman with what little spare time he had, including numerous parachute jumps and paragliding over the Rhine Valley with rented equipment, reaching a high enough level of confidence with it to consider buying his own equipment; and had learned how to fold it up for transporting it on a car rack or even while riding a bicycle or scooter. He had deliberately refrained from familiarizing himself with the city that had become his home so that it would retain some or most of its aspect that had seemed mysterious to him when he first arrived, lest he become bored by it and his life within it become prematurely humdrum. Although he had made many recreational excursions to the local environs outside of the city, when he was in town he was fully focused on his work and therefore had stayed in his immediate neighborhood, so he wasn’t very familiar with most of it. He was pleased by the car-free streets he ran across a couple of times while out strolling in the evening on occasion, but he hadn’t bothered to find out where they were, so he could only find them probably by meandering around again. All in all, he much preferred his current safer and more beautiful urban environment where the countryside was effectively minutes away and that to him was a town; over the huge cosmopolitan Berlin where he painfully remembered toiling in a dearth of satisfaction as an accountant and unrequited scientist.

After a few blocks he came to a small park that had benches to sit on and a large monument in the center of a man sitting on a horse; he sat down on a bench and saw only a couple of other people standing on the other side of the park a few meters away from him. Because it was late at night and there were only a few probably inattentive pedestrians wandering about, he decided to see if he could lift the monument, which was quite large and which he estimated to be an impressive weight of a multiple of tones, perhaps ten or more; but if he was going to do it, now was the time because for all he knew a crowd of youths may gather in the park at any moment and even begin frolicking on or around the monument. He stood up and walked around it to make sure that no one was on the other side of it that he couldn’t see from his original perspective and then he visually swept the entire area around the park and still saw only the two people far from him on the other side; so now he returned to his original location and looked at the monument intently from about four meters away, He mentally ordered it to move upwards, and within seconds he saw it move slightly and then begin to rise from its base. He backed up to a safer distance in case it came crashing down and now tested his prowess significantly further

by lifting it five meters and then about fifteen before slowly lowering it to its normal resting place.

He then retreated further from it as it rose while worrying that someone or something might unexpectedly distract him; he hadn’t tested whether taking his eyes off an object or person that he was affecting caused him to lose control, and he wasn’t ready to try to continue his focus while turning his back to the monument because he was very early in his employment of his newfound power and had to proceed with caution. He didn’t make a mental effort to re-smooth the pavement at the base after lowering it and would cautiously wait a few days before returning to see how precise had been his management of the re-placement; and he had no doubt that there was detritus around the base caused by the cement that kept it in place breaking up when he lifted it. Just as it settled back into its original spot, he heard someone gasp behind him followed by an oral expression of surprise and realized that someone behind him was watching this whom he had failed to notice, or they had just arrived and were reacting with shock and probably fear, which he presumed was because something that large and heavy suddenly having headed upward such a large distance could rise a second time and next time land anywhere including on top of them. He didn’t want the people behind him to see his face, so he didn’t turn to look at them and instead briskly but not at what might be construed as a suspiciously precipitous departure, walked away from them and the plaza and didn’t look back or stop walking until he was home.

It seemed likely to him that this event was going to be reported by one or more witnesses and that even if he had succeeded in returning the monument to its exact spot from which he lifted it, experts who inspected damage to the cement at the base would probably conclude that the evidence appeared to confirm that it had been moved by some unknown force, perhaps by an otherwise detected earthquake directly underneath it. He knew that authorities were aware that people often return to the scene of their crimes to survey the results of their work, but he also knew that if it became a prominent news event he would be just one among hundreds or more Heidelbergers who were likely to visit the monument to gawk at it within the next few days. This time, neither during his strenuous mental effort nor after it was there any side effect, no vertigo, no collapse, no nothing; he felt perfectly normal and satisfied and enjoyed his usual full night of sleep. The next morning he read a newspaper while eating breakfast at his favorite café, and indeed there was a minor news report about the phenomenon, but neither the police nor the municipal park service had commented on it when queried by a local reporter. However, he smelled a possible trap from the official reticence, so he stayed away from the park; and anyway, he didn’t know what it was called or where it was and wasn’t inclined to find out this early in the game, and he was disappointed that photographs of how the base looked showing whether there was cement or other debris around it weren’t included or even mentioned in the newspaper report. Local detectives surely knew that perpetrators often return to a crime scene, so they may have advised the officials to try to lure whoever was responsible for this event back to the monument to view his, her – or more likely, their – handiwork.

He certainly didn’t intend to allow his intense curiosity about how the monument looked from a short distance to lead him into a trap. Even though he knew nothing could be pinned on him, being targeted and interrogated by officials wasn’t likely to redound to his benefit, including highly undesirable publicity. And he needed to avoid getting too big for his britches because if the German or any other government became convinced he could do something so extraordinary,

it wouldn’t be inhibited by legal proprieties from coming down on him like a ton of bricks. Was he ready for prime time now, or should he lift the local Heidelberg or Schwetzingen schlosses, which were gargantuan castles, not just relatively small monuments, or might such an intense show of force be so strenuous it could might injure or kill him? He dismissed the entire idea as soon as he thought of it because he didn’t want to take a risk of damaging any historic Deutschland icons. Should he go out and do something dramatic such as disabling a nuclear missile silo as UFOs were reported to have done on multiple occasions? What about if he went to a place where UFOs were regularly spotted, would he be able to make one crash and settle the controversy of who or what was in one of them? This would handily solve the frustration of lights in the sky being unidentifiable as real objects rather than “marsh gas” or some such strange phenomena. And if he brought one down and approached the crash site and military personnel likewise came swooping down on it, would he have the power to fend them off?

His lab propulsion work had now clearly become less promising than his sonar experiment because maybe the sky was the limit for it; and not in a matter of speaking but rather literally; and he was lacking even the minimal financial and procurement support to make significant progress with his propulsion project from his recalcitrant boss in Berlin who was constantly reassuring him but not coming through with his promises. He decided to continue his daily treatments until he felt that he had reached whatever the apex was of the possibilities or there was a sign of aberration in his brain scans signaling the risk of a tumor or other negative consequences. He thought that in a way, it was too bad the Berlin wall was gone because he was sure he could knock it down in a minute and create a furor unlike any since World War II when the entire continent was in one – his detestation for the East German regime nearly matched his contempt for the Nazis who came before them. He wouldn’t mind going to Washington and collapsing the White House, but that would be a risky business, and he felt an uninviting presence there that he couldn’t pinpoint; he repeatedly asked himself who or what could possibly be there that he needed to avoid, but each time he considered it he came up blank; as time went by, it evolved into one that he became determined to confront. Additionally, he felt a premonition that if he wiped out the entire country it would boomerang on him in some way he failed to anticipate; he hadn’t previously been given to premonitions, but he also hadn’t been given to dreams and they had worked out more or less accurately for him, so he decided to heed it for now at least.

So, okay, he won’t go to the U.S. just yet – but where to instead and what to do with his power next? It occurred to him that maybe the sky wasn’t really the limit for his newfound powers, and an idea glimmered vaguely until it finally came to him; that night there was a full moon, so he went out on his balcony after dinner and gazed at it while summoning what he thought of as his Mindpower. Slowly, oh so gradually notable characteristics on one side began to move in one direction until they finally disappeared into darkness: he had succeeded in rotating the moon, but only slightly because he felt himself dizzying from the effort and also didn’t want to change its face that had been the same for eons too radically, so he ended the experiment. The next day as a precaution because of the recurrrence of his dizziness, he stopped the sound wave treatments. The moon’s rotation became a sensational headline in all news media the next morning, but initially he wondered if he actually did it or if an unconscious prescience had compelled him to look at it at the precise moment that it occurred; however, based on his

previous successes, he tentatively concluded that the former was by far more likely to be the case.

Up to now he had essentially played with his newfound power, but what kind of work could he do with it? He had sufficient confirmation of its impressive capabilities now, so he needed to move on to whatever next stage might be. For instance, perhaps he propel vehicles as big as mountains through the air and even through space at high speed while watching them through some kind of medium such as video cameras, but perhaps not at or even near light speed; so it may have limited applicability for space travel, but since propulsion was his bread and butter he decided to focus on this. But how? Should he take a chance and go all in my propelling his body to a height of thousands of feet, perhaps strapped into a comfortable office chair? No he decided, that was out because if for some reason if he lost his power he would plunge to the ground. What about if he went up in some kind of air vehicle such as a helicopter or a plane with engines that he could turn off after launch and turn back on if something went wrong? But since he had no skills in the takeoff, flying or landing of any type of aircraft, that would require a pilot who would be willing to turn off the engines or suffer through Reffner doing it, and if they remained aloft he would deduce that Reffner had kinetic power and tell others about it, so he would have to do this where nobody knew him and use a false name; he had sometimes considered adopting the permanent alias Klaus Radder that he made up out of whole cloth, until recently when the thought of it oddly began to morbidly frighten him; at any rate, he could use it for a single event, and with his false name and the pilot as the only witness, his claim about what he saw Radder do might gain attention on one of the UFO sites or radio shows but would surely be deemed by officials to be as minimally credible and probably not at all.

He experimented by lifting himself off the floor all the way to the ceiling in his home, but began to feel a slight and unexpected vertigo and had to lower himself again, but he thought maybe this just took getting used to and after some practice maybe he could rise to the top of a high rise or even into outer space, though he may not survive the cold, radiation, the lack of oxygen, etc. that was no problem for the comic book hero Superman – and then again, Reffner might have the same power and ability. He could go aloft at night to avoid drawing attention and use his power to rise far into the sky, and then if he ran into trouble with thinning oxygen or the vertigo he had already experienced from the strenuous mental effort, he could draw some from a tank he brought along, and if worst came to worst he could parachute to a safe landing; he had to approach this scientifically because he wasn’t suicidal and nothing would come of his efforts if he crashed to his death due to an inexcusable failure to anticipate problems and prepare for them in advance. He tried holding his breath and after five minutes with no discomfort he finally inhaled, which indicated that he may never need to breathe again, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with that assumption and would take along some oxygen on his trip skyward. Finally, after considering other options he decided that paragliding was the ticket and the next day bought one, a used parachute, oxygen gear and a barometer; he preferred to buy everything new, but he didn’t find a local vendor that sold all of the items new and did find used ones on Craigslist. He had packed and unpacked a parachute before a few times and now did it again several times at home just so that he would feel comfortable with the task.

Although he had done some skiing, he hadn’t participated in any radically cold outdoors activities and had no arctic hat, gloves or boots that would protect him from the extreme

temperatures that he would encounter at high altitudes; so he bought moisture-controlling, heavyweight snowmobile pants designed to insulate people in temperatures far below zero. He probably couldn’t consult an avionics expert without revealing his intentions, so he decided to proceed ad hoc, since he probably didn’t need any equipment anyway. Based on the principle that it was better to be over- rather than under-prepared and his intention to fly as high as forty thousand meters, he bought virtually all-encompassing ballooning – rather than paragliding – equipment: position lights, a precision micro-electronic pressure altitude GPS-variometer and a military-type diluter demand oxygen regulator, a mechanical altimeter and vertical velocity indicator, but waited to test them after they had all arrived at his door. His oxygen delivery apparatus was designed to automatically respond directly to pressure altitude and had a weight of under ten kilograms including the oxygen bottle, regulator, cannula, mask, cylinder harness and accompanying hardware; it conveniently functioned automatically, with no scales to observe or inconvenient knobs to turn whether while climbing or descending.

Although he hadn’t done any ballooning, he had read on the Internet that in terms of oxygen it is essentially upside down scuba diving in which a person floats upward through the atmosphere instead of downward into water; he had prior experience with breathing with an oxygen mask when he recently went scuba diving a few times. Because he would start relatively near the bottom of the sea of air, he would initially use his oxygen supply at a rapid rate but as he went higher his consumption of it would slow due to the decreasing atmospheric pressure; adjusting for new pressures wouldn’t be a problem because his equipment would automatically do that by reading the physiological properties of his body. He planned to breathe oxygen most of the way up to about three thousand meters and back down to where he could turn off his oxygen device and take off the helmet. He calculated that he would have enough oxygen for at least two hours of flight, ambitiously expecting to traverse at least ten kilometers laterally and as many as forty in a short time before finally landing; although he might like to remain aloft longer, he had to avoid his instructor panicking and notifying authorities that he may be lost or have crashed. If the pilot of a search plane spotted him thousands of feet higher than any paraglider could take a person it could cause attention to be drawn to him, resulting in potentially inauspicious consequences. Because he expected to fly high enough to find himself in the flight patterns of airplanes, he would need to quickly ascertain his maneuverability when he began his upward climb at a steep angle incommensurate with the capabilities of a paraglider. This meant that he may need avionics to meet air traffic control requirements, additional flight instruments and perhaps a means to record the maximum altitude that he attained. For air traffic control communications he bought a radio that interfaced with the mask mike and with the helmet earphones. He considered whether he needed a communication frequency and purchased a transponder pack with an altitude encoder and rechargeable batteries good for at least two hours.

He decided not to bring along a digital audio recorder because he would be wearing an oxygen mask for most of the flight that would render his voice incomprehensible. HisGPS-variometer device had an envelope-mounted antenna for navigating back to the landing zone.

He packed the avionics and instruments into a cardboard box that provided him with easy access to the controls via a hinged lid that he installed on it; it allowed air into it so that the instruments that he lined with protective cushioning and would accurately read his conditions but

at the same time was insulated to stay warm enough to function throughout the flight. He carefully and thoroughly glued straps to the box that would hold it to his chest; and this way he could readily access it if and when it was necessary for him to do so. He was now ready to give it a go, and it seemed to him that all of the items together didn’t comprise too much bulk or be awkward to carry on either his bicycle or scooter, but he nevertheless enlisted his previous glide instructor to pick him up with his truck the following Sunday and drive him to a high slope and then help him unpack to launch himself out over a valley; and then drive to the designated landing site where he would help him his repack gear and return it and to his home. His instructor didn’t bring his own glider and instead planned to drive into the valley after Reffner launched and wait to receive a call from him to prepare to pick him up; he was surprised at the substantial gear that Reffner was bringing with him and donning before beginning his run and made a pithy remark about how he was now ready to fly to the moon – and received a dry and cryptic reply that this was indeed the intention; that was as far as it went about Reffner’s parka and bulky equipment. When he previously glided he hadn’t noted how many people were walking or driving around below him, so he had no idea going in whether he could do something unusual without many people noticing because he had focused on controlling his flight rather than looking down at the ground; but after he launched and was soaring through the air he saw that there were very few people below who might look up and see him when he reached a significant height. Moreover, accounts by a few witnesses of extraordinary behavior by a small object or what may be a large bird high in the sky were unlikely to obtain much credibility; might receive mention on a UFO radio show but other than that it was likely to receive scant public attention.

He swooped around for half an hour, accustoming himself to a typical glide while contemplating the reality that when he rose multiple kilometers into the sky there may be little or no aerodynamics flow to keep him aloft and if his newfound power failed him he could plunge – with the wing no longer functional as one really and nothing more than spreads of useless cloth – at which point he would have to free himself from it to avoid his parachute tangling up with it.

Just when he felt comfortable with a normalcy of gliding, he suffered a dreaded, radical in-flight deflation; his wing wavered and then unaccountably and suddenly went limp and draped over him like a falling curtain, throwing him into immediate discomposure and regret that he hadn’t learned enough about this sport to know this could happen so suddenly; but he instantly willed them back up and was back in business and soon after became more confident than ever. He decided it was time to make his move and willed himself upwards, climbing straight up and reached fifteen thousand meters where theoretically he was now fully dependent for survival on his oxygen tank. He stayed in place for a few seconds to look around for any hazards and then rose again to more than twenty thousand kilometers; after reaching that elevation, he headed for the landing zone to return home, knowing he had doubled the highest previous altitude by a paraglider who lived to tell about it, but compared to his other efforts such as rotating the moon it seemed like nothing to him. He wasn’t about to allow himself to become drunk with the feeling that he had turned into a Superman – even though there was a possibility that he actually had or was on his way to becoming one – and having accomplished his intended experiment, he decided to end it forthwith by descending in a rapid spiral dive normally reserved for highly experienced paragliders.

When he arrived back home he prepared himself tea and sat down on his living room couch to assess what he had accomplished, and was disappointed to conclude that it was very minimal and barely more than symbolic because all he had done with all that equipment purchase and endeavor for an hour’s worth of flying around. He had been constrained by the cold and lack of oxygen at a higher altitude, otherwise he would have tried for five or even twenty thousand meters: The sky’s the limit. As he sat there, he tried something completely new by stopping his breathing without holding his breath, and as a minute and then five went by he felt no ill effects, which indicated that by his sheer brain power he was able to survive without oxygen; though he wasn’t comfortable enough to see for how long and resumed breathing after ten minutes. He picked up a pen that was on his coffee table in front of him and poked his left arm with it hard enough to feel some pain, then willed himself hard and when he stabbed himself in the same spot repeatedly and with much more force the pen simply bounced off as if it had struck metal or concrete. Was he now or was in the process of becoming immortal and invulnerable? He touched his arm and pinched it, and it seemed normal to him; now he kicked himself mentally for not having removed the mask and opened his parka while high in the sky and found out if he was impervious to the -40 F that his readings told him he was in, but he also knew it could have proven to been folly to count on this and risen to ten or twenty kilometers only to have his Mindpower fail him, causing his thoroughly avoidable demises.

He got up and walked to his linen closet, retrieved his sewing kit and returned to the sofa.

He took out a sewing needle and poked himself on the right arm with it but felt nothing even when he repeated it with extreme force; then he took a pair of scissors out, closed his eyes and slammed it down on his arm and it bounced off the same way the pen did. He wondered how far he could take this, could he explode a grenade in his hand and suffer no injury? He felt somewhat dismayed that he didn’t have a way and couldn’t immediately think of one to find out just how protective was his Mindpower – an appellation he just know decided to give it; the problem being that if he excessively challenged it the consequences could be drastic and possibly even lethal; and he also had no inkling about the cause of his occasional dizziness when he taxed his power too much; his brain scans showed no evidence of it but did show evidence of the slight color change of one part of his brain that could be related to either his power or his vertigo or to both. Fortunately, his doctor, though surprised by his brain’s recent scan transformation that he pretended to have no clue about, found no evidence of a tumor or other physical ailment. As he sat on his sofa he assessed his overall prospects; he had throttled people that he was watching live on television, lifted objects weighing tonnes and his own body multiple kilometers above ground and, physically steel his own body to an impressive though not scientifically measured extent; and he had rotated the moon – wide-ranging and presumably unprecedented accomplishments that nevertheless left him unsatisfied. The problem for him was that none of this was work.

Sure, he could lift mountain tops to facilitate mining and clear forests for agriculture, but he had no interest in that type of work and in fact opposed it because of its ecological implications; it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do something destructive but rather that something constructive wouldn’t be reviled, such as lifting an entire island that was anticipated to become inundated by global warming, by slipping a massive slab of concrete under it and carefully lower it onto the slab. Also, long bridges could be constructed far more conveniently on land than over a

waterway, and when they were completed he could lift and place them on their foundations to span over rivers; however, this service would make him a cause celebre with unknown consequences and a disruption of his current privacy. He had surpassed his fellow countryman the philologist Friedrich Neitzsche’s wildest dreams about attaining an uncompromising and unconquerable will. However, unlike another of his fellow countrymen Sigmund Freud who said that the purpose of life was zu lieben und zu arbeiten, Reffner had never been much interested the first part – to love – and in fact only tolerated relationships with other humans of either sex as a necessary evil to further his work and was seriously interested in the second part – to work. His participation in outdoor sports such as underwater tourism, his floating around in the sky, etc. weren’t part of love or even life to him because he could manage perfectly well without all of it and had only taken them up to variegate his physical exercise and because of his boredom that was first due to his unrewarding work as an accountant and more recently by the diminution of his beloved energy project. Although he knew that he could exceed his greatest hopes for propulsion from his official project, he was a person rather than a machine that could propel without thinking as long as it was properly maintained. He asked himself what kind of massive project he could perform without drawing attention to himself and on initial inspection it seemed to him the answer may be none, so frustration and dismay began setting in.

He retired to his bedroom to lie down and listen to Bach and eventually fell dead asleep.

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